Studying traits of organisms (=phenotypes) is one of the central topics in biology. Traits are used for describing species and reconstructing ancestral organism that existed on Earth in the past. However, rigorous trait analysis is currently impeded by complex semantic and hierarchical structure of organismal anatomies. A bulk of studies show that this impediment can be overcome by using ontologies -- computer-understandable representations of anatomies. Thus, to enhance trait analysis, we are going to develop new ontology-based methods for description and automatic comparison of species, and for reconstructing ancestral organisms. We believe that these new methods will open up new unprecedented opportunities to analyze traits. We will explore our methods using invertebrates and birds.

2021

2026