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(Modified from our grant abstract:)
Defining and understanding the evolutionary relationships among species is
fundamental to contemporary biology and the application of the comparative
method in the life sciences. The results of such evolutionary research can
be represented by a branching sequence of relatedness among species known
as a phylogeny. Because of the geometric resemblance of a phylogeny to
the branches of a tree, a phylogeny can be thought of as a tree of life.
Our collaborative research by biologists and computer scientists at
University of Texas-Austin and at Lehman College - City University of
New York provides specialized visualization and data mining tools to
facilitate creation of a "Tree of Life" for all living organisms on
the earth. This includes the development and refinement of algorithms
to visualize and analyze multiple complex data sets for large numbers
of species. More specifically, our plans include: (1) integrating biological
data through visualization and clustering techniques developed by computer
scientists, and (2) applying these tools to taxa which comprise very
large numbers of species with topologically complex and varied tree
structures. Our newly developed software is integrated with existing
computational tools in systematic biology (namely Mesquite), and is
freely available to and (hopefully!) easily usable by the scientific
community. |
Tree Set Viz : Visualizing
Tree Space