NEW YORK, Feb. 5 - The National Science Foundation has announced a May 5, 2003 deadline for proposals for its Assembling Tree of Life program.
According to the NSF, the project has the goal of assembling a framework phylogeny, or Tree of Life, for all 1.75 million described species. Researchers will study the origins of land plants from algae; seek to understand a "diverse group" of the spiders; investigate fungi and parasitic roundworms; and correlate the relationships of birds and dinosaurs.
The grants for the Assembling the Tree of Life, as the project is known, support "large multi-investigator, multi-institutional, international teams of scientists who can combine expertise and data sources, from paleontology to morphology, developmental biology, and molecular biology, the NSF said.
The NSF distributed $17 million among more than 25 institutes in FY 2002 for the project.
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