Dissertation Research: Systematics and evolutionary history of the southern redback salamander: using next generation sequencing with organisms with large genomes

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The southeastern United States is a hotspot for amphibian biodiversity, but many amphibian species in the region are undergoing rapid declines. This is especially true for salamanders, which are incredibly diverse in the Southeast. Examining genetic relationships, climate factors, and changes in geographic distributions can increase our understanding of the complex mechanisms influencing the generation and decline of species. The goals of this project are to combine data from new methods of DNA sequencing with geographic and environmental data, in order to test hypotheses about evolutionary relationships of the southern redback salamander and changes in its geographic distribution through time. Salamanders have genomes approximately 10 times larger than humans, and this large genome size can pose problems for new DNA sequencing methods. This project will test the utility of a newly established DNA sequencing protocol in resolving evolutionary relationships for species with large genomes. This research will be the first study to use a next-generation DNA sequencing technique to generate a genome-wide data set of 400-800 million DNA sequence fragments for a species. Results from this study will inform salamander conservation, amphibian systematics, and evolutionary biogeography more generally, as well as the future of systematics studies of organisms with large genomes.