A comprehensive, online, updateable tree of life

Karen Cranston / @kcranstn / slides on GitHub

Outline

  1. How did this happen?
  2. Building the tree
  3. Live Demo!
  4. What's next

Why don't we have the tree of life?

What does 'we have the tree of life' mean?

Summarize existing phylogenetic knowledge into a tree of life that is 1. complete; 2. online; 3. easily updateable.

Building the Open Tree of Life

Two kinds of inputs

  1. Phylogenies
  2. Taxonomies

I. Phylogenies

  • computationally derived
  • highly resolved
  • limited taxon coverage

I. Taxonomies

    • manually curated

    • poorly resolved

    • much more taxonomically complete

Graph Databases (neo4j)

Phylogeny = nodes and edges

Input conficting tree

Extract a single tree from the graph

Open Tree of Life v 3.0

  • 2.23 million tips
  • 7 input taxonomies
  • 483 input trees
  • 46,000 tips from phylogeny
  • Database of 7500 trees from 3300 studies

Tip = lineage with > 500 OTUs

Red = Many sequences in GenBank; Blue = Few sequences

Tip = lineage with > 500 OTUs

Black = at least one tip from phylogeny

https://tree.opentreeoflife.org

Improving the tree

Missing phylogenies

Taxa without alignable data

Incomplete / out of date taxonomies

Unsampled taxa

Generating alignable data

Improving taxonomies

    Databases describing OTUs in microbial trees

    (aka Tell Me More about “YNP Site_2 (81%) 2024889491”)

Collaborators

Funding from NSF AVAToL

What services do you want for tree of life data?