There is a new release (94) of the SILVA database of ribosomal DNA sequences. 23,133 Metazoans, 88,997 Eukaryotes and 606,879 SSU sequences in total.
I’m having a few problems installing ARB on a new machine but need to start exploring this phenomenal phylogenetic resource more closely. One thing I would love when browsing large trees purely for fun is to see pictures at the tips. I wonder if you could automatically grab taxon images, perhaps from Yahoo, maybe in a similar way to Rod Page’s iSpecies? A few problems with this I guess, but it ought to be quite achievable. It would certainly make the trees much more fun to non taxonomists. The “animal tree of life” paper in Nature that I mentioned in a previous post provokes many more positive comments from my colleagues when they see the tree than I have ever seen with other phylogenies. I suspect it is because the authors include nice drawings at the tips. This simple thing might turn out to be very important for accessibility and dissemination of systematic info.
Apr 162008