Deep Arthropod Phylogeny from 100 Targeted Nuclear Coding-region Sequences

Clifford Cunningham，Joel Martin，Jermoe Regier，Jeffrey Schultz&Amp；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团队授予了一项赠款。这笔赠款将支持迄今为止为解决节肢动物进化中的主要问题所做的最大努力。节肢动物--包括昆虫、虾、蜈蚣、马蹄蟹、蜘蛛和扁虱--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群体之间的关系尚不清楚。这笔赠款将使用来自三个完全测序的动物基因组(人类、蠕虫和苍蝇)的信息来帮助我们从85个具有代表性的节肢动物物种中获得一个巨大的核蛋白编码序列数据集。这个数据集将包括每个物种大约50,000个碱基对的DNA序列，比现有最大的数据集大10倍以上。这个项目不仅将决定主要节肢动物群体的关系，还将告诉我们哪一类海洋甲壳类动物(虾、龙虾和螃蟹)是与昆虫最接近的近亲，这是任何动物群体中最成功的陆地入侵。这笔赠款还将支持开发新的统计方法，以估计节肢动物进化中主要事件的日期，并包括一项创新计划，开发教学模块，使洛杉矶地区和美国其他地区的贫困K-12学生了解富有魅力的节肢动物的进化。

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.