Data Sources for Trait Databases: Comparing the Phenomic Content of Monographs and Evolutionary Matrices
| Autor: | Paula M. Mabee, David C. Blackburn, T. Alex Dececchi |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
Computer and Information Sciences Databases Factual Tree of life lcsh:Medicine Morphology (biology) Biology Research and Analysis Methods computer.software_genre 03 medical and health sciences Quantitative Trait Heritable Animal Musculoskeletal Anatomy Phylogenetics Genetics Ontologies Medicine and Health Sciences Animals Evolutionary Systematics Animal Anatomy Comparative Anatomy Molecular Biology Techniques lcsh:Science Molecular Biology Phylogeny Taxonomy Data Management Evolutionary Biology Molecular Biology Assays and Analysis Techniques Multidisciplinary Database Phylogenetic tree lcsh:R Organisms Biology and Life Sciences Paleogenetics Phylogenetic Analysis Phenotypes Phenotype 030104 developmental biology Variation (linguistics) Taxon Vertebrates Trait lcsh:Q Anatomy Zoology computer Research Article |
| Zdroj: | PLoS ONE, Vol 11, Iss 5, p e0155680 (2016) PLoS ONE |
| ISSN: | 1932-6203 |
| Popis: | Databases of organismal traits that aggregate information from one or multiple sources can be leveraged for large-scale analyses in biology. Yet the differences among these data streams and how well they capture trait diversity have never been explored. We present the first analysis of the differences between phenotypes captured in free text of descriptive publications ('monographs') and those used in phylogenetic analyses ('matrices'). We focus our analysis on osteological phenotypes of the limbs of four extinct vertebrate taxa critical to our understanding of the fin-to-limb transition. We find that there is low overlap between the anatomical entities used in these two sources of phenotype data, indicating that phenotypes represented in matrices are not simply a subset of those found in monographic descriptions. Perhaps as expected, compared to characters found in matrices, phenotypes in monographs tend to emphasize descriptive and positional morphology, be somewhat more complex, and relate to fewer additional taxa. While based on a small set of focal taxa, these qualitative and quantitative data suggest that either source of phenotypes alone will result in incomplete knowledge of variation for a given taxon. As a broader community develops to use and expand databases characterizing organismal trait diversity, it is important to recognize the limitations of the data sources and develop strategies to more fully characterize variation both within species and across the tree of life. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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