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Catalog for life on earth
With 30 percent of species likely to disappear by 2050, mapping the family tree finds new urgency.
Not since an asteroid smacked into Earth to end the reign of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago has the evolutionary future of life on the planet been rewritten as extensively or as suddenly as it is being rewritten today.
By the middle of this century, many biologists estimate, human activities from urban sprawl and deforestation to overfishing will have erased up to 30 percent of the species inhabiting the planet.
Millions of those plants, animals, insects, and microbes never will have mushroomed under a field researcher's microscope. Their potential value for the ecological role they play or the useful chemicals they produce and place in history will go unassessed.
This prospect is adding urgency to a new effort to build a comprehensive "family tree" of life on Earth from bacteria to whales and all their fossilized ancestors. In the process, researchers hope to pull together an Internet-based catalog of Earth's existing species.
An exhaustive "tree" establishing the evolutionary relationships of organisms, and a catalog placing them in their ecological niches, are expected to become powerful tools for guiding conservation efforts, discovering new chemical compounds for human use, and even investigating suspected acts of bioterrorism.
Researchers add that the tree of life will yield new insights into evolution itself, answering such questions as how often photosynthesis emerged, and whether life evolved only once. And, they say, the prospect of being able to address these questions marks a new chapter in the life sciences.
"We are at a historic turning point in biology," says Harvard University entomologist Edward Wilson.
He explains that biologists until now have been reductionists, probing organisms down to the level of individual genes. This has culminated in various projects to map and sequence the genomes of organisms ranging from bacteria to humans.
Looking for the forest, after years of trees
"Now biology is entering its synthesis phase," he continues. "We're trying to put it all back together. This puts the emphasis on complexity, on self-assembly, on interdisciplinary work, and on the lateral spread of studies of an organism" among scientists worldwide.
This interdisciplinary approach is one of the distinguishing features of the new tree-of-life effort, says Quentin Wheeler, director of the environmental biology division at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va.
"Until now, this sort of work has been done piecemeal, with individual scientists slogging on their own," says Dr. Wheeler.
The NSF is spending up to $10 million this year and is seeking $12 million for next year to begin the process of mapping "significant branches of the tree," he says. The agency's tree-of-life initiative, which could expand into an international effort following meetings with biologists in Europe later this year, could take up to 15 years to complete.
