Suvarna Garge (Editor)

Open Tree of Life

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Available in
  
English

Commercial
  
no

Launched
  
September 2015

Website
  
opentreeoflife.org

Registration
  
not required

Current status
  
active

Open Tree of Life

The Open Tree of Life is an on-line phylogenetic tree of life – a collaborative effort, funded by the NSF AVAToL #1208809. The first draft, including 2.3 million species, was released in September 2015. The Interactive graph allows the user to zoom in to taxonomic classifications, phylogenetic trees, and information about a node. Clicking on a species will return its source and reference taxonomy.

Contents

Approach

The project uses a supertree approach to generate a single phylogenetic tree (served at https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/) from a comprehensive taxonomy and a curated set of published phylogenetic estimates.

The taxonomy is a combination of several large classifications produced by other projects; it is created using a software tool called "smasher". The resulting taxonomy (the Open Tree Taxonomy, OTT) can be browsed at https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/taxonomy/browse.

The set of phylogenetic estimates that are inputs to the supertree method are curated via a web application (at https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/curator). Any user with a GitHub login is permitted to curate a tree. Curation activities include:

  • uploading a tree from a published paper or an archival data store such as TreeBASE.
  • rerooting the tree. This is often necessary many phylogenetic methods estimate unrooted trees which are subsequently rooted by other means (see Computational phylogenetics). The rooting of these trees in supplementary information for publications and in data stores is frequently incorrect.
  • associating the tip labels of a tree to the open tree taxonomy to make it feasible to compare different phylogenetic hypotheses.

    • The curated data store is available for use by others as git repository. All software produced by the project is available under open source licenses; see http://opentreeoflife.github.io/ for links to the code, data, and documentation.

    History

    The project was started in June 2012 with a three-year NSF award to researchers at ten universities. In 2015, a two-year supplemental award was made to researchers at three institutions.

    References

    Open Tree of Life Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA