NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2021: A synthetic biogeographic history of iguanian lizards

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2021, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Scientists evaluate biological diversification by studying how organisms are related to one another (phylogeny) and their geographical distributions through time and space (historical biogeography). Although the geographical distributions of extinct species (which are generally known from fossils) can be dissimilar to the distributions of living descendants, most biogeographical inferences are made from living species. The fellow will employ datasets to study the phylogeny and biogeography of Iguania, a diverse, well-known, and globally distributed lizard group. The project will exemplify an integrative biogeographical approach that can be applied to any group of organisms for which genetic data and fossils are available. Additionally, studying the historical distributions of iguanians is important for understanding present distributions and projecting future distributions of those lizards. The fellow will mentor undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds and train those students in the collection of morphological data. Results will be presented via outreach events, conferences, and publications.The goals of the project are to 1) infer phylogenetic relationships and divergence times among iguanian lizards, and 2) estimate a biogeographic history of iguanian lizards in a probabilistic framework. The fellow will collect phylogenomic and morphological data from ~200 living iguanian lizard species, and morphological data from 30 extinct species, leveraging fossils, skeletons, alcohol-preserved specimens, and tissue samples in museum collections. The study will employ a phylogenomic marker set (179 long and rapidly evolving exons) particularly well-suited for inferring the phylogeny of Iguania, and a published phylogenetic matrix of 150 skeletal and soft-tissue morphological characters specifically constructed for the group. Time-calibrated phylogenies of the combined-evidence dataset will be estimated and used in biogeographic analyses, which will infer the ancestral ranges of the various iguanian lizard clades across the ~150 million-year history of Iguania. The study will address whether specific climatic and geologic events can explain geographic range changes in iguanian lizards during the Cretaceous and Cenozoic. The fellow will receive training in next-generation sequencing and bioinformatic processing of genomic datasets. The fellow will create an online module to communicate the biogeographic findings to undergraduate students, including those underrepresented in the biological sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.