Life Sciences Commons^™

Synthesis Of Phylogeny And Taxonomy Into A Comprehensive Tree Of Life, Cody E. Hinchliff, Stephen A. Smith, James F. Allman, J. Gordon Burleigh, Ruchi Chaudhary, Lyndon M. Coghill, Keith A. Crandall, Jiabin Deng, Bryan T. Drew, Romina Gazis, Karl Gude, David S. Hibbett, Laura A. Katz, H. Dail Laughinghouse Iv, Emily Jane Mctavish, Peter E. Midford, Christopher L. Owen, Richard H. Ree, Jonathan A. Rees, Douglas E. Soltis, Tiffani Williams, Karen A. Cranston

Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

Reconstructing the phylogenetic relationships that unite all line- ages (the tree of life) is a grand challenge. The paucity of homologous character data across disparately related lineages currently renders direct phylogenetic inference untenable. To reconstruct a comprehensive tree of life, we therefore synthesized published phylogenies, together with taxonomic classifications for taxa never incorporated into a phylogeny. We present a draft tree containing 2.3 million tips— the Open Tree of Life. Realization of this tree required the assembly of two additional community resources: (i) a comprehensive global reference taxonomy and (ii) a database of published phylogenetic trees mapped to this taxonomy. …