iPlant Tree of Life (iPToL)

Knowledge of evolutionary relationships is fundamental to biology, yielding new insights across the plant sciences, from comparative genomics and molecular evolution, to plant development, to the study of ecosystems.

The iPlant Tree of Life (iPToL) Grand Challenge Project has organized intellectual investment from the phylogenetics and computer sciences communities to help construct a cyberinfrastructure capable of scaling up phylogenetic tree inference methods by 100-fold or more. iPToL enables the dissemination of data associated with such large trees (as many as 500,000 plants), and enables "post-tree" analysis method such as phylogenetic comparative methods and tree reconciliation to help integrate the plant tree of life with other botanical sciences.

Unraveling the evolutionary relationships among all living things on such a scale, is one of the largest scientific challenges ever undertaken.