The Kew Tree of Life Explorer allows users to explore evolutionary trees of life and to access the genomic data that underpin them.
The Kew Tree of Life Explorer is an output of the Plant and Fungal Trees of Life Project (PAFTOL) at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. PAFTOL aims to discover and disseminate the evolutionary history of all plant and fungal genera. The evolutionary tree of life is fundamental to our understanding of the natural world. Comparative studies of DNA sequence data have revolutionised our knowledge of the tree of life, however many gaps remain. In collaboration with partners from around the world, PAFTOL is addressing this challenge by generating, compiling and analysing genomic data for all ca. 13,600 flowering plant and 8,200 fungal genera to build novel trees of life at unprecedented scale.
You can expect to see a lot more trees in the near future! Not least because there are a number of very big initiatives across the world
aiming to sequence a huge number of different species see for example https://www.earthbiogenome.org/affiliat ... t-networks.
Not all C&S and no need to re-label just yet. But it is interesting to have a look at what is just over the horizon.
ralphrmartin wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 4:32 pm
On the contrary Mat, I hope they will include many more taxa which are morphologically the same, but are genetically different....
Oh certainly, one doesn't exclude the other! But how are we then going to distinguish the two morphological twins at home?
An interesting issue for me will be how gene trees align to the species trees from the nuclear genome sequencing data.
The technical paper below lays out the issues quite well.
Copetti, Dario, et al. "Extensive gene tree discordance and hemiplasy shaped the genomes of North American columnar cacti." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114.45 (2017): 12003-12008.
