Scientists unveil a ‘tree of life’ demonstrating how world's 2.3 million species are connected

Scientists have come up with a new ‘tree of life’ that demonstrates how the world's 2.3 million species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes are linked. The project involved 11 institutions and was published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The project has depicted the relationships among living things as they diverged from each other with the course of time, and tracked back to the starting of life on Earth over 3.5 billion years ago.

Principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University said, “This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. Think of it as version 1.0”.

Over the years, tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published for particular branches of the tree of life. Some of them contained upwards of 100,000 species. But this is the first time ever that those results have been brought together into a single tree, encompassing all of life.

The project is like a digital source that seems more like a colored pinwheel than a tree. It is available for free online and anybody can use or edit it, quite similar to Wikipedia for evolutionary trees.

According to scientists, understanding the relationship among the millions of species on Earth will likely lead to the discovery of new drugs, increase crop and livestock yields. It could also trace the origins and spread of infectious diseases like HIV, Ebola and influenza.

Researchers, instead of building the tree of life from scratch, pieced it together by compiling thousands of smaller chunks and merged them into a huge ‘supertree’, encompassing all named species.