Modeling the Tree of Life by resourcing matrices of traits: MorphoBank

Axel Drefahl - May 2014 Tweet

MorphoBank is a web application for virtual collaboration in bioscience—applying and contributing to fields such as anatomy, phylogenetics, paleontology and cladistics. MorphoBank is establishing a research environment and project space for scientists and public audiences, who want to use anatomy to study the Tree of Life, while resourcing phenomic, genomic and fossil data.



The start-up version of MorphoBank was developed by Maureen O'Leary, who is an associate professor of Anatomical Sciences in the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, Long Island, New York [1,2]. O'Leary directs the MorphoBank project for phylogenetic research. She is particularly interested in the mammal Tree of Life. In a recent article on the first appearance and evolution of placental mammals, she writes about MorphoBank's beginnings [2]:

At the start of the project, team members met in person— two dozen of us from five different courties—to bring together all our legacy publications, which held the names of specified traits and the characteristics of species. The data from legacy publications are often difficult to compare because scientists rarely articulate traits in a uniform way; merging various large spreadsheets, or matrices, becomes a complex problem. Moreover, since many traits had been studied for only a subset of mammal species, we needed to find out about their conditions in other mammal species.

Five years of virtual debates about anatomical terminology and ongoing database updating resulted into the initial MorphoBank application.

O'Leary also illustrates the MorphoBank website and its digital library, which archives and offers published and new data on the phenomic traits of mammals. MorphoBank records images of fossil specimens. By combining morphology-based and genetic data, hypothetical phylogenetic trees can be generated and compared by applying customized algorithms. As of May 2014, MorphoBank features over 300 publicly accessible projects.

References and more