Collaborative Research: Phylogenetic Trees for Comparative Biology

系统发生树描述了生物体之间的亲缘关系，是组织和分析生物多样性信息的重要工具。树木被许多研究人员用于比较生物学，对它们的需求很高。拟议中的研究将利用GenBank分子序列数据库中惊人的数据广度（目前包括185，000个物种的序列，约占科学已知所有物种的10%），以建立一个包含10亿个系统发育树的电子库。本研究的目标是建立大量的系统发育树，然后构建简单的搜索和检索工具，将这些树与用户可能感兴趣的任何物种查询列表相匹配。系统发育树的使用者涵盖了现代生物学的大部分领域：流行病学家、基因组学家、功能形态学家、保护生物学家和群落生态学家等等。使用一致的方法建立的分子遗传学知识库，并满足规定的最低水平的统计置信度，将为用户提供一个水平的一致性，需要强有力的推论内和之间的比较生物学研究。

Phylogenetic trees, which depict the genealogical relationships of organisms to each other, are a key tool for organizing and analyzing information about biological diversity. Trees are used by many researchers in comparative biology and the demand for them is high. The proposed research will take advantage of the phenomenal breadth of data in the GenBank molecular sequence database (currently including sequences from 185,000 species, or some 10% of all species known to science) to build an electronic repository of one billion phylogenetic trees. The goal of this research is to build a very large number of phylogenetic trees and then construct simple search and retrieval tools to match these trees to any query list of species in which a user may be interested.The primary impact of this research will be outside of the phylogenetics research community. Users of phylogenetic trees span most areas of modern biology: epidemiologists, genomicists, functional morphologists, conservation biologists, and community ecologists, to name a few. A repository of molecular phylogenies built using a consistent methodology, and satisfying prescribed minimal levels of statistical confidence, will provide users a level of consistency needed for strong inferences within and between comparative biological studies.