Scalable Algorithms for Reconstruction of Plant Phylogenies in Conjunction with the NSF (National Science Foundation) iPlant Collaborative

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Knowledge of evolutionary relationships is fundamental to biology, yielding new insights across the plant sciences, from comparative genomics, molecular evolution, to plant development, the study of adaptation, speciation, community assembly, and ecosystem functioning. Although our knowledge of the phylogeny of green plants has expanded dramatically, the task of assembling a comprehensive tree of life for the half million species of green plants remains daunting. Major barriers confront us in analyzing and synthesizing the data for assembling the tree. This presents a Grand Challenge, which requires expansion of a developing intersection between phylogenetic biology and the computer sciences.Within the NSF iPlant collaborative project we propose to bring plant and computer scientists together to focus on the grand challenge of assembling all knowledge of the phylogeny of green plants and infer a comprehensive phylogeny 100 times larger than existing trees and to integrate the plant tree of life with the rest of botanical sciences. The work at TU München in conjunction with the plant tree of life will focus on developing new algorithms and parallelization strategies to infer single-gene plant trees consisting of at least 500,000 taxa. Scalable methods for tree reconstruction represent a key component for the success of the proposed NSF collaborative.