The computation of trees of life is an extremely computation-intensive (NP-hard) mathematical problem. "For 50 species, more than 10 to the power of 76 possible trees of life exist. Of these, the right one has to be found," HITSter André J. Aberer (HITS), who is also a doctoral student of KIT. Aberer performed the computer analyses. "For comparison: About 10 to the power of 78 atoms exist in the universe." First, the algorithms coarsely filter out the improbable evolution scenarios. Then, based on the data of 14,000 genes of 48 representative bird species, the evolutionary tree of life is calculated, which plausibly explains the data. The new parallel software was run on the high-performance computer "SuperMUC" of the Leibniz Computing Center of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and at two computing centers in the US. The computing power needed corresponds to a computing time of 300 years on a single processor.
"The methods we developed for the computation of the tree of life can be applied to all types of creatures," Stamatakis says. They already allowed for a comprehensive study of the tree of life of insects with 144 species, which was published recently in the Science journal. In addition, it is possible to reproduce the origin and abundance of viruses and bacteria in order to better fight pathogens. Analysis of the genetic relationship of Australian poisonous snakes helped identify the still lacking antidotes for some snake species.
– Genetic fundamentals of biodiversity.
– Genetic fundamentals of the brain regions controlling the evolution of birdsong.
– The loss of teeth of birds about 100 million years ago.
– The relationship between dinosaurs and birds.
– The evolution of colored feathers.
The study of the evolution of birds was made by the "Avian Phylogenomics Consortium", consisting of 200 scientists of 80 institutes in 20 countries. The project was coordinated by Guojie Zhang, BGI, China, Erich D. Jarvis, Duke University, USA, and M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Natural History Museum, Denmark. Tandy Warnow of the University of Illinois and Alexandros Stamatakis coordinated the computer analyses. Alexandros Stamatakis and Andre J. Aberer are the only German co-authors. The study represents the most comprehensive genomic analysis of a vertebrate class and covers ducks falcons, woodpeckers, and other representatives of all branches of modern birds, among others. All data and methods will now be made available cost-free to researchers worldwide for further studies.