TimeTree

TimeTree
Original author(s)S. Blair Hedges, Joel Dudley, Sudhir Kumar
Initial release2006
Stable release
v5.0 / 2022
TypeBioinformatics
LicenseFreeware
Websitewww.timetree.org Edit this at Wikidata

TimeTree is a free public database developed by S. Blair Hedges and Sudhir Kumar, now at Temple University, for presenting times of divergence in the tree of life.[1][2] The basic concept has been to produce and present a community consensus of the timetree of life [3][4] from published studies, and allow easy access to that information on the web or mobile device.[2] The database permits searching for average node times between two species or higher taxa, viewing a timeline from the perspective of a taxon, which shows all divergences back to the origin of life, and building a timetree of a chosen taxon or user-submitted group of taxa.[5] TimeTree has been used in public education to conceptualize the evolution of life, such as in high school settings.[6][7][8] David Attenborough's Emmy Award-winning film and television program Rise of Animals used Hedges and Kumar's[3] circular timetree of life, generated from the TimeTree database, as a framework for the production. The timetree was brought to life using animated computer-generated imagery in scenes every 10 minutes during the 2-hour movie. The original development of TimeTree, by Hedges and Kumar, dates to the late 1990s, with initial support from NASA Astrobiology Institute.[citation needed] Since then, it has been supported by additional grants from NASA, and by NSF and NIH.[citation needed] The current version (v5) was released in 2022 and contains data from 4,075 studies and 137,306 species.[5]

Results of a simple nodetime search in TimeTree database for the divergence time of cats and dogs in millions of years
  1. ^ Hedges, S. Blair; Dudley, Joel; Kumar, Sudhir (4 October 2006). "TimeTree: a public knowledge-base of divergence times among organisms" (PDF). Bioinformatics. 22 (23). Oxford University Press: 2971–2972. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl505. ISSN 1367-4811. PMID 17021158.
  2. ^ a b Kumar, Sudhir; Hedges, S. Blair (2011-07-15). "TimeTree2: species divergence times on the iPhone". Bioinformatics. 27 (14): 2023–2024. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btr315. ISSN 1367-4803. PMC 3129528. PMID 21622662.
  3. ^ a b Hedges, S. Blair; Kumar, Sudhir (2009-04-23). The Timetree of Life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953503-3.
  4. ^ Hedges, S. Blair; Marin, Julie; Suleski, Michael; Paymer, Madeline; Kumar, Sudhir (2015). "Tree of Life Reveals Clock-Like Speciation and Diversification". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 32 (4): 835–845. arXiv:1412.4312. doi:10.1093/molbev/msv037. ISSN 1537-1719. PMC 4379413. PMID 25739733.
  5. ^ a b Kumar, Sudhir; Suleski, Michael; Craig, Jack; Kasprowicz, Adrienne; Sanderford, Maxwell; Li, Michael; Stecher, Glen; Hedges, S. Blair (2022). "TimeTree 5: An Expanded Resource for Species Divergence Times". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 39 (8). doi:10.1093/molbev/msac174. PMC 9400175. PMID 35932227.
  6. ^ Metzger KJ (2011). "Helping Students Conceptualize Species Divergence Events using the Online Tool "TimeTree: The Timescale of Life"". The American Biology Teacher. 73 (2): 106–108. doi:10.1525/abt.2011.73.2.9. S2CID 85026876.
  7. ^ Babaian, Caryn; Kumar, Sudhir (2018). "Time travel and the naturalist's notebook: Vladimir Nabokov meets the TimeTree of Life". The American Biology Teacher. 80 (9): 650–658. doi:10.1525/abt.2018.80.9.650. S2CID 91951552.
  8. ^ Babaian, Caryn; Kumar, Sudhir (2020). "Molecular memories of a Cambrian fossil". The American Biology Teacher. 82 (9): 586–595. doi:10.1525/abt.2020.82.9.586. PMC 8104914. PMID 33967280. S2CID 227304077.