Phyloinformatics: Toward a Phylogenetic Database

Much of the interest in the “tree of life” is motivated by the notion that we can make much more meaningful use of biological information if we query the information in a phylogenetic framework. Assembling the tree of life raises numerous computational and data management issues. Biologists are generating large numbers of evolutionary trees (phylogenies). In contrast to sequence data, very few phylogenies (and the data from which they were derived) are stored in publicly accessible databases. Part of the reason is the need to develop new methods for storing, querying, and visualizing trees. This chapter explores some of these issues; it discusses some prototypes with a view to determining how far phylogenetics is toward its goal of a phylogenetic database.