TreeBASE was a repository of

phylogenetic In biology, phylogenetics () is the study of the evolutionary history of life using observable characteristics of organisms (or genes), which is known as phylogenetic inference. It infers the relationship among organisms based on empirical dat ...

data published in

scientific journal In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, schola ...

s. In phylogenetic studies, research data are collected or generated, such as comparative observations (e.g. character state matrices or

multiple sequence alignment Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is the process or the result of sequence alignment of three or more biological sequences, generally protein, DNA, or RNA. These alignments are used to infer evolutionary relationships via phylogenetic analysis an ...

s) made on a set of

taxa In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; : taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular name and ...

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

about these taxa, and the

phylogenetic tree A phylogenetic tree or phylogeny is a graphical representation which shows the evolutionary history between a set of species or taxa during a specific time.Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA. In ...

s that are inferred to best describe the evolutionary relationships between the taxa.

Mission

The purpose of the TreeBASE project was to provide stable records and identifiers for these data, so that other workers can refer to their deposited data in their publication, and other scientists can locate the data and use them to verify the original research or to include or extend them in further analyses.

History and funding

The project was started in 1994, with funding from the US

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

. After this prototype, a redesign was initiated under the CIPRES project. This new version was released in March 2010 and has been supported by, among others, the pPOD project, which funded the addition of a

RESTful REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

web service interface with CQL search facilities, and National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), which hosted the database and web server. Starting in Winter 2010, TreeBASE was reorganized and became associated with the Phyloinformatics Research Foundation In 2022, TreeBASE was taken offline due to security issues which were unable to be fixed with project resources; the future of the database is uncertain.

References

Bibliographic databases and indexes Academic publishing {{database-stub