A web-based, digital evolutionary tree developed by James Rosindell and Luke Harmon, University of Idaho faculty in biological sciences, is helping biology professor David Tank, and others, explore the mysteries of plant evolution.
The Tree of Life can be found at onezoom.org, and contains the largest amount of compiled data on existing plant species — more than 30,000 species in total.
“OneZoom is meant to be the GoogleMaps for life,” Harmon said. “So now, you have that, and you look at it, and learn about common ancestry. On at the broadest broad scale, it’s really deep and amazing because every living thing on earth, as far as we know, comes from a single common ancestor that lived about 4 billion years ago. If that doesn’t blow your mind, you’re not thinking about it that hard.”
Tank’s project began with the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, which is based in North Carolina. NESCent is a science foundation center that facilitates large research groups, Tank said.
The Tree of Life research group is made up of biologists who are interested in the same type of questions, Tank said. They wanted to bring this big group of diverse backgrounds together to address big ideas — specifically plant trait data.
“We wanted to ask questions about how plant traits evolved on a larger scale than ever before,” Tank said. “The idea there is to get a grasp on the patterns and processes that have led to the diversity of plants we see today.”
Tank’s role, as part of this team, was to assemble a big evolutionary tree that covered all the species there was trait data for, while including information about the specific times of evolutionary relationships.
This database provided a framework to ask questions about evolution. To understand the distribution of traits, Tank said, you first need to see how they are related to each other. They are visualizing this through OneZoom.
OneZoom’s first draft took about a year from start to finish, but is all automated. Harmon said the future of this lies in anyone entering their own data, and embedding personalized OneZooms on various websites.
“You’d think someone has to take forever to enter this all by hand, but it’s not done by hand,” Harmon said.
Harmon said Rosindell is also looking into getting OneZoom into museums. Harmon said the project is something anyone can use — which is rare, since it is produced by scientists.
“I think it’s a cool toy that actually helps you learn about the tree of life,” Harmon said. “Toy is not a bad thing.”
Tank’s project led to a paper about the evolution of traits and climate. Tank said this covered specifically how plants have handled cold temperatures and surviving.
Plants have three ways to adapt to cold weather, Tank said. They can drop their leaves, they can withdraw underground and wait or they can develop narrower water pathways, which reduces the possibility of forming water-blocking air bubbles.
“It turns out that two of the traits evolved first, in response to something else, and then after they were exposed to freezing temperatures … these traits were advantageous and co-opted into traits that helped them survive the cold.”
This, Tank said, was a surprise that could only be found because of the scale of traits they were studying — the number of comparisons possible made these questions answerable.
“Understanding the evolutionary history is fundamental to understanding how and why we have the diversity of organisms we have today,” Tank said. “This is true with all organisms, including our own history and our own traits.”
Tank said everyone in the biology field is using evolutionary trees more, and a variety of biologists are coming together to ask larger questions.
“For me, as an evolutionary biologist that studies phylogenetics, that’s kind of cool,” Tank said.
Alycia Rock
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