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

Temple University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

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.