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Scientists around the world, including taxonomic experts studying everything from insects to viruses and dinosaurs to plants, work every day to add to our knowledge of biodiversity through scholarly research released in peer-reviewed publications. MorphoBank, developed and supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation as well as institutional members, is a digital archive of those data, facilitating open sharing of observations published by today's scientists.
Specifically, MorphoBank assists scientists building the Tree of Life - the genealogy of all living and extinct species. In this endeavor scientists must collect data on all heritable features - both genotypes (e.g., DNA sequences) and phenotypes (e.g., anatomy, behavior, physiology). MorphoBank is part of the new and growing cyberinfrastructure for phenotypes to house, save and share information on anatomy, physiology, behavior and other features of species. The genomic part of this work is archived at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
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MorphoBank is a web application providing an online database and workspace for evolutionary research, specifically systematics (the science of determining the evolutionary relationships among species). One can think of MorphoBank as two databases in one: one that permits researchers to upload images and affiliate data with those images (e.g., species names, anatomical descriptions) and a second database that allows researchers to upload morphological (phenomic) data and affiliate it with what are called 'phylogenetic matrices'. Phylogenetic matrices are spreadsheets that have species in rows and obserations about those species in columns. In both cases, MorphoBank is project-based, meaning a team of researchers can create a MorphoBank project within which they initially share images, matrices and associated data exclusively with each other. When a paper associated with the project is published, the research team can make their data permanently available for public view on MorphoBank where it is now archived.
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1) Too much information was being lost when morphologists produced an article with a new phylogenetic tree. No archive existed for morphologists to store the images and matrices that backed up their cell scores. Images and matrices need to be readily available in both human- and computer-readable formats for the science of morphological systematics to be repeatable. Publishing a matrix on MorphoBank in conjunction with a peer-reviewed article, now considered a best practice, guarantees that the anatomical descriptions of a character and its character states are easily accessible for other researchers to repeat and build on results.
2) Seeing images that document the basis for homology in a character state or a cell score is enormously helpful to researchers during their research project. This is particularly important if their matrices are large (hundreds of taxa and thousands of characters). Before MorphoBank, a researcher would have had to trust her memory as she made comparisons among hundreds of species. It seemed much more scientific to store an image of a character to refer to repeatedly while adding new data.
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