OSU Department of Biomedical Informatics

Assembling the Tree of Life

Assembling the Tree of Life: An Integrative Approach to Investigating Cnidarian Phylogeny

  • funding agency: National Science Foundation
  • date: 10/2005 - 09/2010
  • grant amount: $2,850,000.00

  • The tree of life project is computationally challenging because the search space is is vast and the organisms have very old as well as recent divergence times. Thus phylogenetic analyses will require heuristic estimates and exploration of various optimality criteria, alignments, and parameters for transformation costs. We will address the computational costs through parallelization, the synergistic implementation of heuristic tree search strategies and self-built computing clusters comprised of commodity PC components.

    Analyses will be of multiple genes and methods to safeguard against accepting a result specific to one approach. All methods lead to incorrect results under some conditions (e.g. parsimony when evolutionary rates differ across taxa likelihood when evolutionary rates vary over time.

    Finally, no one gene can be expected to provide resolution of ancient and recent phylogenetic groups. Via simultaneous analysis of many genes we seek an additive phylogenetic signal that overcomes noise that is expected to be random to that signal.

    Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the material resulting from this grant are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

  • Project Investigators:

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