Scientists say The Tree of Life — a
Web-based database of the relationships and characteristics of all
groups of Earth organisms — is growing.
The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists
from around the world. On more than 4000 World Wide Web pages,
the project provides information about the diversity of organisms
on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny),
and characteristics.
Each page contains information about a particular group of organisms
(e.g., echinoderms, tyrannosaurs,
phlox flowers, cephalopods,
club fungi, or the salamanderfish
of Western Australia). ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically,
in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root
of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to
individual species, the structure
of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between
all living things.
Although originally started as a way for
scientists to share data, project organizers now want members of the
public to also contribute to the Tree of Life Web site.
The
project, a collaboration of the world’s scientists, is fundamentally a
genealogy of life on Earth coupled with information about the
characteristics of individual species and groups of organisms, said
David Maddison, creator of the project and a professor of entomology at
the University of Arizona-Tucson.
My
dream is to be able to do grand-scale analyses of patterns of life
across all of life, said Maddison. You need to think about the
evolutionary tree along which genes have flowed in order to explain why
organisms are as they are.
Katja
Schulz, managing editor of the Tree of Life Project at the university,
spoke Monday during the annual meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, explaining plans to allow the public to
contribute.
She says she determined to make this cool science available to the public.
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