Computing life´s family tree [phylogeny]

Call it yet another biological gold rush. When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, scientists began working in earnest to document the world´s plant and animal species and build a phylogeny - a map of how all those species relate to each other. More scientists came to the discipline in the 1980s, when automated DNA sequencing offered a way to classify species and applications for phylogenetics. Thanks to such efforts, at least a small sample of genetic code is on file in databases worldwide for some 100,000 of Earth´s organisms. The largest such database, GenBank, contains more than 42.7 million genetic sequences, and counting. But scientists have yet to realize Darwin´s phylogeny; they´ve sampled genes piecemeal - a rice gene here, a mouse protein there - and have connected relatively few species. Today, the prospectors in the gold rush are those with enough expertise in computing to connect all that genetic data in a meaningful way. The goal is the same as it was 150 years ago: build the ultimate family tree.