CIBR:Accelerating the discovery and utility of the timescale of life

科学家们需要一个精确的时间尺度来计算生命树的基因组变化率，并更好地了解生物系统，生态系统和整体生命的进化。时间尺度来自于个体和物种之间组装和比较的基因组信息。然而，关于时间尺度的信息分散在科学文献中的数千篇文章中，难以检索。时间树项目通过收集和合成这些信息到一个可供科学家和公众访问的计算数据库中来克服这个问题。用户可以获得任何组的时间树（校准到时间的树），或自定义物种列表。他们还可以获得一个时间轴，从任何选定的物种的角度显示进化分支，追溯到生命的起源。地质学和天文学历史上的事件与生物时间树和时间线在同一时间尺度上同步，促进了跨学科的发现。TimeTree的持续发展通过提供研究数据，允许研究人员进行数据挖掘，并促进其作为公共和教育资源的使用，扩展了这一主题。新的TimeTree资源通过主要技术和数据扩展为研究人员和公众带来了关于物种分化时间的快速增长的知识。这确保了获得关于物种、亚种和种群的分歧时间的最新信息。扩展是通过新的工具和应用程序编程接口来实现的，以促进数据挖掘，允许在研究时间树和生命的合成时间树之间进行比较。通过内部进行共同分析，如时间线图和多样化分析，促进了研究探索，以便研究人员可以立即看到任何群体的结果。通过新的软件和应用程序编程接口，使数据提交和同化过程自动化，并使TimeTree成为社区贡献的可持续资源，维护成本最小化，可持续性得到改善。TimeTree（www.timetree.org）使世界各地的研究人员能够查询、检索、可视化和探索模式并制定假设，并提高了对进化研究的集体投资的科学和社会回报。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Scientists require an accurate timescale for the tree of life to calculate rates of change in genomes and to better understand the evolution of biological systems, ecosystems, and life overall. The timescale comes from genome information assembled and compared among individuals and species. However, information on the timescale of time is scattered among thousands of articles in the scientific literature in a form that is difficult to retrieve. The TimeTree project overcomes this problem by collecting and synthesizing this information into a computational database accessible to scientists and the public. Users may obtain timetrees (trees calibrated to time) of any group, or of a custom list of species. They may also obtain a timeline showing evolutionary branches from the perspective of any selected species, going back in time to the origin of life. Events in geological and astronomical history are synchronized in the same timescale with biological timetrees and timelines, facilitating cross-disciplinary discovery. Ongoing advances in TimeTree expand on this theme by serving study data, allowing data mining by researchers, and facilitating its use as a public and educational resource.The new TimeTree resource brings the fast-growing knowledge on species divergence times to researchers and the public through major technology and data expansion. This ensures access to the most up-to-date information on divergence times of species, subspecies, and populations. The expansion is accomplished with new tools and application programming interfaces to facilitate data mining, allowing comparisons among study timetrees and the synthetic timetree of life. Research exploration is facilitated by conducting common analyses in-house, such as lineages-through-time plots and diversification analyses, so that researchers may immediately see the results for any group. Maintenance costs are minimized, and sustainability is improved with new software and application programming interfaces, automating the data submission and assimilation process, and making TimeTree a sustainable community-contributed resource. TimeTree (www.timetree.org) enables researchers worldwide to query, retrieve, visualize, and explore patterns and formulate hypotheses, and improves scientific and societal return on the collective investment in evolutionary research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.