Doctoral Dissertation Improvement: Development of Genomic Methods to Clarify the Evolution of Life History Trade-offs.

妊娠是生殖成功的标志，但历史上很少有人关注非人灵长类动物妊娠相对于生殖中的其他关键因素，如性选择，竞争和后代的父母照顾的研究。这项研究建立在其他人的基础上，进一步发展了一个准确的新世界猴的遗传学，允许在进化背景下追踪生活史特征的变化。这项研究还促进了女性在科学和培训高中和本科生在实验室技术和遗传学。这项研究采取了比较基因组学和系统发育的方法来检查怀孕的作用，在一个独特的研究人群中的生殖因素。新世界猴的callitrichine分支（绒猴，绢毛猴和戈迪猴）是研究妊娠进化的理想群体，因为每窝产生的后代数量存在自然变化。此外，绒猴表现出双胞胎生殖细胞嵌合体，其中个体携带其（兄弟）同窝出生的生殖细胞。 此外，戈迪氏猴转录组的产生允许检查Callitrichines中数千个基因的进化历史，明确测试假设，即涉及产仔数和嵌合体的基因（例如涉及胎盘形成，生长，免疫和血管发生的基因）显示适应性进化的证据与妊娠变化的时间一致。测试关于哪些基因在callitrichine谱系中经历了适应的假设将填补这些灵长类动物所展示的迷人生物学的分子基础知识的空白，并将为灵长类动物生物学的未来研究奠定基础。 最后，在一个血统良好的群体中对个体进行基因分型，以测试戈迪猴是否在失去双胞胎能力的情况下仍保留了嵌合体。这些发现将有助于理解父母照顾的进化，也将为免疫耐受在进化过程中如何建立和维持提供线索。

Pregnancy is a hallmark of reproductive success, yet historically little attention has been paid to the study of nonhuman primate pregnancy relative to other key factors in reproduction such as sexual selection, competition, and parental care of offspring. This study builds on others to further develop an accurate New World monkey phylogeny that allows changes in life history traits to be traced within an evolutionary context. This research also advances a female in science and trains high school and undergraduate students in laboratory techniques and genetics.The research takes a comparative genomic and phylogenetic approach to examine the role of pregnancy with respect to reproductive factors within a unique study population. The callitrichine clade (marmosets, tamarins and Goeldi's monkeys) of New World monkeys is an ideal group in which to study the evolution of pregnancy because of natural variation in the number of offspring produced per litter. Moreover, marmosets exhibit twin-twin germline chimerism, in which individuals carry the reproductive cells of their (fraternal) littermates. In addition, the generation of a Goeldi's monkey transcriptome allows examination of the evolutionary history of thousands of genes in callitrichines, explicitly testing hypotheses that genes involved in litter size and chimerism (e.g. genes involved in placentation, growth, immunity, and vasculogenesis) show evidence of adaptive evolution coincident with the timing of the changes in pregnancy. Testing hypotheses about which genes have undergone adaptations in callitrichine lineages will fill a gap in knowledge about the molecular underpinnings of the fascinating biology exhibited by these primates, and will lay the foundation for future studies in primate biology. Finally, the genotyping of individuals within a well-pedigreed colony tests whether Goeldi's monkey has retained chimerism, despite having lost the ability to twin. These findings will have implications in understanding the evolution of parental care and also will provide clues into how immune tolerance is established and maintained during evolution.