UF scientists Doug Soltis, Brian Drew, Ruchi Chaudhary, and Gordon Burleigh contributed to a multi-institutional effort to construct a tree of life describing the relationships among ~2.3 million species. The study appears this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This research is part of the “Open Tree of Life”, a National Science Foundation funded research effort to build a community resource to synthesize knowledge about the evolutionary relationships from all species. Having a tree of life will help researchers studying diverse disciplines related to biodiversity, including agriculture, ecology, medicine, and climate change. However, this study also highlights the amount that is unknown about many diverse forms of life. The Open Tree of Life team hopes the tree will stimulate future biodiversity research, and they are developing software that will enable researchers to update and revise the tree as new species are named or discovered. To browse the current tree of life online, visit www.etreeoflife.com or www.opentreeoflife.org.
