Phylogeny and Evolution of Ranunculales: An Integrative Approach

毛茛目植物是一个分布在世界各地的高度多样化的开花植物群。它包括一些重要的科，如罂粟（罂粟科），小檗（小檗科）和毛茛（毛茛科），其中许多有不同的园艺和药用用途。了解毛茛属植物的进化关系尤为重要，因为毛茛属植物是一个重要的大型开花植物群——毛茛属植物的基础。本提案要求为毛茛属植物相对广泛的取样建立形态学数据集提供资金，特别强调最有可能在化石记录中保存的特征（以便整合化石数据）。同时，确保完整的分子数据集匹配物种的DNA测序将完成，为形态学工作提供可靠的框架。这种形态和分子数据的结合和比较将用于探索与化石数据整合、形态特征如何进化以及通过化石校准进行分子定年相关的问题。将化石数据纳入进化树将有助于确定更准确的谱系年代估计和这些估计的生物地理学含义。这项工作将产生新的形态学（特别是微形态学花粉、毛状体、气孔模式）和分子数据，并将提供良好解决和支持的进化树，这将在许多生物学领域（如古植物学、生态学、民族植物学、生物地理学）中有用。这些分子数据将存储在GenBank中，并将生成的进化树存储在TreeBase中，从而使它们通过网络在全世界范围内可用。各种整合化石数据的技术将被探索和比较。将建立一个可靠的、完全可搜索的形态学数据库，并将通过网络向专业人员和公众开放。该数据库将包括图像、进化树、数据矩阵、描述、词汇表和参考文献。博士后研究员将接受形态学和分子系统发育工作的培训（这在当时是罕见的结合）。在这个项目的时间里，几名本科生将被雇用，获得宝贵的实验室经验，以及对科学家如何工作有更深的了解。

The order of plants, Ranunculales, is a highly diverse group of flowering plants found throughout the world. It includes such important families as the poppies (Papaveraceae), barberries (Berberidaceae), and buttercups (Ranunculaceae), many of which have diverse horticultural and medicinal uses. Understanding evolutionary relationships in the Ranunculales is especially important as they are at the base of a large and important group of flowering plants called the eudicots. This proposal requests funding for the construction of a morphological data set for a relatively extensive sampling of Ranunculales, with a special emphasis on those traits most likely to be preserved in the fossil record (to allow for the integration of fossil data). Concomitantly, the DNA sequencing necessary to ensure complete molecular data sets for matching species will be done, providing a reliable framework for the morphological work. This combination and comparison of morphological and molecular data will be used to explore questions related to the integration of fossil data, how morphological characters evolved, and molecular dating with fossil calibrations. The integration of fossil data into evolutionary trees will be helpful in determining more accurate estimations of the dating of lineages and the biogeographical implications of those estimates. The proposed work will result in new morphological (especially micromorphological pollen, trichomes, stomatal patterns) and molecular data and will provide well resolved and supported evolutionary trees that will be useful in numerous biological fields (e.g., palaeobotany, ecology, ethnobotany, biogeography). The molecular data will be deposited in GenBank and the resulting evolutionary trees in TreeBase, thus making them available throughout the world via the web. Various techniques for integrating fossil data will be explored and compared. A reliable and fully searchable morphological database will be constructed and will be accessible via the web to both professionals and the public. The database will include images, evolutionary trees, data matrices, descriptions, a glossary, and references. A postdoctoral researcher will be trained in both morphological and molecular phylogenetic work (a rare combination at this time). Over the time of this project, several undergraduates will be employed, gaining invaluable lab experience as well as a deeper understanding of how scientists work.