{"id":213334,"date":"2025-05-06T05:15:48","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T10:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/a-fully-automated-tool-for-species-tree-inference"},"modified":"2025-05-06T05:15:48","modified_gmt":"2025-05-06T10:15:48","slug":"a-fully-automated-tool-for-species-tree-inference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/a-fully-automated-tool-for-species-tree-inference","title":{"rendered":"A fully automated tool for species tree inference"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego is making it easier for researchers from a broad range of backgrounds to understand how different species are evolutionarily related, and support the transformative biological and medical applications that rely on these species trees. The researchers developed a scalable, automated and user-friendly tool called ROADIES that allows scientists to infer species trees directly from raw genome data, with less reliance on the domain expertise and computational resources currently required.<\/p>\n

Species trees are critical to solidifying our understanding of how species evolved on a broad scale, but can also help find functional regions of the genome that could serve as drug targets; link physical traits to genomic changes; predict and respond to zoonotic outbreaks; and even guide conservation efforts.<\/p>\n

In a new paper published<\/a> in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i> on May 2, the researchers, led by UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Yatish Turakhia, showed that ROADIES infers species trees that are comparable in quality with the state-of-the-art studies, but in a fraction of the time and effort. This paper focused on four diverse life forms\u2014 placental mammals<\/a>, pomace flies, birds and budding yeasts\u2014though ROADIES can be used for any species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego is making it easier for researchers from a broad range of backgrounds to understand how different species are evolutionarily related, and support the transformative biological and medical applications that rely on these species trees. The researchers developed a scalable, automated and user-friendly tool called [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}