Creating a tree of life

Carnegie, Jan/Feb 2003

National Science Foundation Award funds research of Brad Livezey, Curator of Birds

A flood of new information, from whole-genome sequences to inventories of Earth's biota, is transforming 21st century biology. Along with comparative data on the form and structure of organisms, on fossils, and the development, behavior, and interactions of all forms of life on Earth, the new data streams make even more critical the need to organize a framework

(a Tree of Life) for obtaining information, analyzing it, and making predictions.

Curator of Birds Brad Livezey was one of a group of 12 scientists from eight institutions and four countries that were recently awarded a $2 million, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to work on constructing a family tree of evolution for theropod dinosaurs (including modern birds). The research is based on DNA sequence data and comparative morphology. Livezey specializes in the latter.

The NSF program creates a database and an overall system that researchers can use in tracing the genealogical map for all lineages of life on Earth. It is an evolutionary tree that allows scientists to gather information about ancestral nodes and descendent nodes of different life forms. The information available may be in the form of names, images, sounds, movies, text, or people (experts on the subject).

Unlike the single investigators or small teams that have previously studied the evolutionary pathways of heredity within particular phyla or domains, the Tree of Life allows for a greatly magnified effort by large teams working across institutions to analyze some 11.7 million described species.