ToLweb project – Dinoflagellates

In the last decade, advances in a variety of fields ranging from molecular biology and genomics, to statistics and phylogenetic reconstruction methods, to environmental surveys and the description of new species, have in combination led to a significant improvement of our understanding of protist diversity and evolution. To recognize these advances, and to establish a flexible resource to concentrate and distribute our knowledge about the biology and diversity of microbial eukaryotes in the context of the phylogenetic relationships among protists, a massive update of the “protist” sections of the Tree of Life Web Project (www.tolweb.org/tree) was planned.

ToLweb Projekt – DinoflagellateThe ultimate goal is to ‘populate’ the protist pages with pictures, references, links, and text discussions of their structure and appearance, habitat, biology and molecular biology, genomics, evolution, taxonomy, and of course their internal phylogeny and relationship to other eukaryotes. The idea is to create a high quality resource that might serve as a protist diversity textbook and at the same time provide a ‘first stop’ for researchers trying to find out more about a group that is new to them.

The ToL Project is collaborating with the emerging Encyclopedia of Life (EOL, http://eol.org/).
Together with Juan Saldarriaga (UBC, Canada) I am doing and organizing contributions to the dinoflagellate page (http://tolweb.org/Dinoflagellates/2445).