Deep Arthropod Phylogeny from 100 Targeted Nuclear Coding-region Sequences

DEB-0120635Clifford Cunningham、Joel Martin、Jermoe Regier、Jeffrey Schultz 和 Jeffrey Thorne 已向来自杜克大学、马里兰大学、马里兰大学生物技术研究所、北卡罗来纳州立大学和洛杉矶县自然历史博物馆的跨学科研究人员团队授予了资助。这笔赠款将支持迄今为止最大的努力，以解决节肢动物进化中的主要问题。 节肢动物——包括昆虫、虾、蜈蚣、鲎、蜘蛛和蜱虫——所代表的物种比其他动物的总和还要多。 尽管进行了十多年的分子研究，但这些主要节肢动物类群的关系仍不清楚。这笔赠款将利用来自三种完全测序的动物基因组（人类、蠕虫和苍蝇）的信息来帮助我们获得来自 85 个代表性节肢动物物种的核蛋白编码序列的巨大数据集。 该数据集将包括每个物种约 50,000 个碱基对的 DNA 序列，比现有最大数据集大 10 倍以上。该项目不仅将决定主要节肢动物类群的关系，还将告诉我们哪类海洋甲壳类动物（虾、龙虾和螃蟹）是与昆虫最接近的亲戚，这代表了任何动物类群对陆地最成功的入侵。 这笔赠款还将支持开发新的统计方法来估计节肢动物进化中重大事件的日期，并包括开发教学模块的创新计划，让洛杉矶地区和美国其他地方的贫困 K-12 学生了解魅力十足的节肢动物的进化。

DEB-0120635Clifford Cunningham, Joel Martin, Jermoe Regier, Jeffrey Schultz & Jeffrey ThorneA grant has been awarded to an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Duke University, University of Maryland, University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, North Carolina State University, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. This grant will support the largest effort to date to solve the major questions in the evolution of the arthropods. The arthropods -- which include insects, shrimp, centipedes, horshoe crabs, spiders and ticks -- represent more species than the rest of the animals combined. Despite more than a decade of molecular work, the relationships of these major groups of arthropods are not known. This grant will use information from the three completely sequenced animal genomes (human, worm, and fly) to help us obtain a giant dataset of nuclear protein coding sequences from 85 representative arthropod species. This dataset will include approximately 50,000 base pairs of DNA sequences per species, which is more than 10 times larger than the largest existing dataset.This project will not only decide the relationships of the major groups of arthropods, but will tell us which group of marine crustaceans (shrimps , lobsters and crabs) are the closest relatives to the insects, which represent the most successful invasion of land by any animal group. This grant will also support development of new statistical methods to estimate the dates of the major events in arthropod evolution, and, includes an innovative plan to develop teaching modules to expose underprivileged K-12 students in the Los Angeles region, and elsewhere in the country, to the evolution of the charismatic Arthropoda.