CAREER: Evolution of Morphological Diversity in Primates as revealed by 3D Digital Data, Comprehensive Datasets, and Automated Phenotyping

在这个职业奖项中，Doug Boyer博士将与合作者一起，以博物馆标本的3D数字图像的形式收集关于灵长类骨骼的数据，并应用新开发的算法方法来分析和解释这些数据的进化意义。这项研究将解决有关现代灵长类物种多样性是如何形成的基本问题，努力完善对将人类与其近亲区分开来的渐进过程的理解。作为这项研究的结果，3D数字模型将被添加到杜克？S虚拟博物馆(www.morosource.org)，所有研究人员和公众都可以访问该博物馆；他的团队正在开发的生物信息学分析工具将使研究人员能够分析和解释关于几何复杂方面的解剖多样性的数据。博耶将同时与教育科学家合作，以强调STEM学习和下一代科学标准的方式，将这个虚拟博物馆与教育工作者和学生联系起来。此外，这个向任何科学家开放的虚拟博物馆将提供一个论坛，研究人员可以在这里轻松地向教育工作者和公众传播他们的数据(以及由此产生的理论进步)。在博耶为期5年的项目中，他将进行研究，目标是理解灵长类动物如何进化的核心假说：1)食物生态对灵长类动物特征的影响：牙齿几何形状的机械特性将被量化，它们的进化节奏和模式将被模拟在活的和化石的灵长类动物中，以了解昆虫或草本植物的饮食是否推动了不同时期的多样性。该团队还将通过评估所有感兴趣的特征之间的协变模式，来评估灵长类骨骼的某些其他独特特征是否与饮食需求或其他生物角色有关。2)功能限制对进化模式的影响：Boyer和他的团队将通过分析比较灵长类不同骨骼区域之间的差异幅度和模式，确定对祖先灵长类生态问题的解剖学解决方案如何影响随后的多样化路径。这个项目将贡献多项研究，引入一种新的范式来检验进化论假说。此外，它创建了一个新的生物信息学基础设施，使对形态数据集的访问民主化，并使更广泛的研究人员能够分析此类数据，为使形态研究与基因组研究同步奠定基础，并最终将利用形态学研究的解释能力最大化，以洞察进化过程。特别是，分子和进化发育生物学家将能够评估与遗传和基因表达数据相关的形态变异的重要性，生物医学工程师将能够更快、更有效地自动化测量方案和评估数据中的变异。

In this CAREER award Dr. Doug Boyer, along with collaborators, will collect data on primate skeletons in the form of 3D digital imagery of museum specimens and apply newly developed algorithmic methods to analyze and interpret the evolutionary meaning of those data. This research will address fundamental questions about how modern primate diversity came to be, work to refine understanding of the incremental processes that differentiated humanity from its closest relatives. As a result of this research 3D digital models will be added to Duke?s virtual museum (www.morphosource.org), which is accessible to all researchers and the public; the bioinformatics analysis tools his team is developing will enable researchers to analyze and interpret data on geometrically complex aspects anatomical diversity. Boyer will simultaneously work with education scientists connecting this virtual museum to educators and students in ways that emphasize STEM learning and Next Generation Science Standards. In addition, the virtual museum -- open to contributions from any scientist -- will provide a forum where researchers can easily disseminate their data (and theoretical advances stemming from it) to educators and public.In Boyer's 5-year project he will execute studies targeting hypotheses central to perceptions of how primates evolved: 1) Influence of dietary ecology on primate characteristics: mechanical properties of tooth geometry will be quantified and their evolutionary tempo and mode will be modeled across living and fossil primates to see whether a diet of insects or herbaceous material has driven various episodes of diversification. The team will also evaluate whether certain other distinctive features of primate skeletons can be related to dietary needs or other biological roles by assessing patterns of covariation among all traits of interest. 2) Influence of functional constraints on patterns of evolution: Boyer and his team will determine how anatomical solutions to ecological problems in ancestral primates have affected subsequent paths of diversification by running analyses that compare magnitudes and patterns of variation among different regions of the skeleton across primates. This project will contribute multiple studies introducing a new paradigm for testing evolutionary hypotheses. Additionally, it creates a novel bioinformatics infrastructure that democratizes access to morphological datasets and enables a broader community of researchers to analyze such data, setting the stage for synchronizing morphological studies with genomic ones, and will ultimately maximizing the explanatory power of research utilizing morphology to gain insight on evolutionary processes. In particular, molecular and evolutionary-developmental biologists will be able to evaluate the significance of morphological variation associated with genetic and gene-expression data, and biomedical engineers will be able to automate measurement protocols and evaluate variation in their data more rapidly and efficiently.