• Our vision

     . . . is for convenient, computable, credible access to the "Tree of Life" comprising expert knowledge of phylogeny: the species tree you want, in ready-to-use form, when you want it.

  • Approach

    We are building a system of loosely coupled components (for name-reconciliation, tree discovery, pruning, grafting, scaling, etc) that can be configured flexibly, and plugged into existing tools or systems (e.g., Mesquite-o-Tastic).

    An application is phylotastic to the extent that, in response to a user query S, it supplies expert phylogenetic knowledge of S, in a form useful for research, in a timely manner.

    where S is a list of identifiers such as { "Mus musculus", "Homo sapiens", "Pan troglogytes" }. Try it at the Phylotastic web portal (create a list by uploading a doc containing names, scraping names from a web page, or sampling from a named taxon)!

  • Get involved!

    Do you have a bug report, a suggestion or a feature request? Use our bit.ly/phylofeedback form, or add it to the issue list on github.

    This is an open project. If you want to contribute as a programmer, use-case expert, or tester, please contact Arlin Stoltzfus (IBBR), Brian O'Meara (UTK) or Enrico Pontelli (NMSU). Do likewise if your organization (museum, institute, etc) might benefit from a collaboration to build on the tools that you see here.

  • More info

    • explore our demo products
    • browse the list of web services
    • read "Phylotastic! Making tree-of-life knowledge accessible, reusable and convenient" (BMC Bioinformatics 2013, 14:158).
    • for the seriously interested, read the 2014 NSF proposal (PDF)

  • Credits

    • As of mid-2015, the Phylotastic project is funded by the National Science Foundation (#1458572 Collaborative Research: ABI Development: An open infrastructure to disseminate phylogenetic knowledge).
    • We thank the OpenTree project for ongoing cooperation
    • We thank the intrepid participants in the Phylotastic hackathon of 2012. The hackathon was organized by the Leadership Team and the PIs (Enrico Pontelli, Rutger Vos and Arlin Stoltzfus) of HIP (Hackathons, Interoperability, Phylogenies), a working group of NESCent. We thank NESCent, iPlant and BioSync for their initial support.
    • We especially thank NESCent, the NSF-funded center that aided synthetic science and interoperability for 10 years before closing in 2015.