Researchers Release First Draft Of Open Source 'Tree Of Life

[Spinnor]

From,

http://www.ibtimes.com/researchers-...ree-life-23-million-species-organisms-2105757

In a project funded by the University of Michigan and the U.S. National Science Foundation, researchers from 11 different institutions have finished creating the first draft of the “Tree of Life.” The special tree does not yield any fruit, however, it interlinks 2.3 million different species of plants, animals and other creatures to depict their evolution.

The Tree of Life maps the species of organisms that existed at the beginning of life on the planet, dating back to 3.5 million years in the past. The researchers took reference from the different family and species trees published earlier to come up with the detailed and comprehensive Tree of Life. The previous family trees detailed up to 100,000 species, however, this is the first time that a detailed map encompassing across all forms of life has been developed. ...

Similar to the “Wikipedia” for evolutionary trees, the Tree of Life is available in the form of a digital resource that can be used or edited by anyone. The first draft of the tree created by the researcher also accompanies the underlying data and source code. The complete details of the creation has been described in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

[Andy Resnick]

I think it's worth mentioning that this is only one 'tree of life'- for example, the above does not apparently account for lateral gene transfer:

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1527/2177
http://www.letunic.com/development.html
http://www.embl.de/aboutus/communication_outreach/media_relations/2005/050701_hinxton/

For example, the origin(s) of mitochondria and chloroplasts.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

This is also not the only web-based browser of the "Tree of Life." Here's another one that doesn't go down as far at the species level, but provides much more annotation on the various branches: http://tolweb.org/tree/