Resolving the trunk of the angiosperm tree and 12 of its
thorniest brances Update: Click here for a preliminary tree of
577 angiosperms based on 12 genes. The National Science
Foundation's Assembling the Tree of Life is a grand initiative
to describe the roughly 1.7 million known species on this planet
in a comprehensive phylogeny of organisms to better aid in the
retrieval, analysis and prediction of the earth's biota. The
Angiosperm Tree of Life (AToL) is comprised of multidisciplinary
teams using innovative research to analyze whole-genomic
sequences and multigene approaches to resolve the evolutionary
relationship between all the major lineages of angiosperms. To
date, AToL has resolved many of these problematic deep-level
relationships, including among basal angiosperms, rosids,
Caryophyllales, and Campanulids. Additionally, the AToL is using
a newly recreated Campanulid supertree of over 4,000 taxa to
explore the comparison of supertree and supermatrix approaches
for building comprehensive phylogenetic