Award Abstract # 1759846
Collaborative Research: ABI Development: Cultivating a sustainable Open Tree of Life

NSF Org: DBI
Division of Biological Infrastructure
Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED
Initial Amendment Date: April 25, 2018
Latest Amendment Date: January 26, 2022
Award Number: 1759846
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Reed Beaman
DBI
 Division of Biological Infrastructure
BIO
 Directorate for Biological Sciences
Start Date: May 1, 2018
End Date: April 30, 2024 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $435,242.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $488,150.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2018 = $435,242.00
FY 2022 = $52,908.00
History of Investigator:
  • Emily Jane McTavish (Principal Investigator)
    ejmctavish@ucmerced.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of California - Merced
5200 N LAKE RD
MERCED
CA  US  95343-5001
(209)201-2039
Sponsor Congressional District: 13
Primary Place of Performance: University of California - Merced
CA  US  95343-5001
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
13
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): FFM7VPAG8P92
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): ADVANCES IN BIO INFORMATICS,
Capacity: Cyberinfrastructure
Primary Program Source: 01002223DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 1165, 9150, CL10
Program Element Code(s): 116500, 168y00
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.074

ABSTRACT

For over 150 years, scientists have been classifying different plants, animals, fungi, and microbes based on how these organisms are related to one another. The Open Tree of Life project created a comprehensive website that summarizes these relationships. This website makes it easier for biologists to find previously discovered knowledge about evolutionary relationships and to obtain the data that underlies this knowledge. Understanding the evolutionary relationships between organisms is crucial to answering questions in all areas of biological research. The website is used in research that improves agriculture, fights diseases, conserves biodiversity, ensures food safety, and improves our understanding of basic processes in biology. The Open Tree of Life website also provides students and teachers with up-to-date biological information across the entire tree of life. This project will add several features to the core of the Open Tree of Life project to make it sustainable and to keep the resource up to date.

The Open Tree of Life project has built and deployed the first comprehensive tree of life. That project is used by individual biologists and by other informatics projects. This project will ensure the sustainability of the Open Tree of Life effort by adding new features to the user interface that motivate data deposition and curation, improving the rate and reliability of automated procedures for incorporating new data into the tree, and fixing several aspects of the core infrastructure to make the site easier to maintain and cheaper to run. The results of this work will be available at the Open Tree of Life site (https://tree.opentreeoflife.org) throughout the project.

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.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

Note:  When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

Brock, Kinsey M and McTavish, Emily Jane and Edwards, Danielle L "Color Polymorphism is a Driver of Diversification in the Lizard Family Lacertidae" Systematic Biology , v.71 , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syab046 Citation Details
Field, Jasper Toscani and Abrams, A. Jeanine and Cartee, John C. and McTavish, Emily Jane "Rapid alignment updating with Extensiphy" Methods in Ecology and Evolution , v.13 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13790 Citation Details
Lopez Fang, Lesly and Peede, David and Ortega-Del Vecchyo, Diego and McTavish, Emily Jane and Huerta-Sánchez, Emilia "Leveraging shared ancestral variation to detect local introgression" PLOS Genetics , v.20 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1010155 Citation Details
McTavish, Emily Jane "Linking Biodiversity Data Using Evolutionary History" Biodiversity Information Science and Standards , 2019 https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.36207 Citation Details
Sanchez Reyes, Luna L. and McTavish, Emily Jane "Approachable Case Studies Support Learning and Reproducibility in Data Science: An Example from Evolutionary Biology" Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education , v.30 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2022.2099487 Citation Details
Sánchez_Reyes, Luna_L and McTavish, Emily_Jane and OMeara, Brian and Silvestro, ed., Daniele "DateLife: Leveraging Databases and Analytical Tools to Reveal the Dated Tree of Life" Systematic Biology , v.73 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syae015 Citation Details

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

The Open Tree of Life project (Open Tree) is a collaboration developing tools to curate and share evolutionary estimates covering the entire tree of life. Open Tree provides a framework for a robust, reproducible, and extensible resource to link biodiversity, genomic, evolutionary, and other biological data. We regularly publish new synthetic trees and new taxonomies (https://tree.opentreeoflife.org). The current synthetic tree comprises 2.4 million tips and incorporates data from 1,239 published phylogenies.

Open Tree provides a phylogenetic information resource, through the synthetic tree itself as well as several of the data resources generated in the process of building the synthetic tree. OpenTree provides programmatic access to both the input and the summary data. We have developed and published python and R packages providing easy access to our data and API tools. Through these tools Open Tree provides an essential information resource for several other NSF funded bioinformatic projects, as well as several public outreach and K-12 teaching resources. All Open Tree software is open source, and all data is shared under a CC0 Open Access license.

In this grant we simplified the software used to develop and share the tree which makes the infrastructure easier to maintain long term. We improved the tree synthesis software to make the tree synthesis much faster and more efficient. We also added several new features. These features include the ability to generate a custom synthesis tree for any set of input studies and taxa, and to translate date information from published studies onto nodes in the complete tree for downstream analyses of dated trees.

This project has constructed the largest and most complete picture of the tree of life to date, and has made that data freely available to anyone around the world.


Last Modified: 09/11/2024
Modified by: Emily Jane Mctavish

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.

Print this page

Back to Top of page