Collaborative Research: Phylogenetic Trees for Comparative Biology

系统发育树描述了生物之间的谱系关系，是组织和分析生物多样性信息的重要工具。比较生物学的许多研究人员都使用树木，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，约占科学已知物种的10%）来建立一个包含10亿个系统发育树的电子存储库。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。这项研究的主要影响将超出系统发育研究界。系统发生树的使用者跨越了现代生物学的大多数领域：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，仅举几例。使用一致的方法建立的分子系统发育库，满足规定的最低统计置信度水平，将为用户提供在比较生物学研究内部和之间进行强有力推论所需的一致性水平。

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.