Phylogeny and Evolution of Ranunculales: An Integrative Approach

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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.