Phylogenetic and evolutionary genetic studies on Drosophilid flies in the east Asia region.

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The East Asian region is endowed with the highest level of bio-diversity in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere, and therefore, of crucial importance in investigating the evolutionary history and mechanism of speciation in drosophilids. Until 1970's, drosophilid fauna in the continental Asian region was poorly known. However, extensive surveys have been made under international cooperation among scientists from Japan and China (supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A)(1) ; 2000-2002), and have brought about a considerable amount of knowledge on the drosophilid faunas in the southeast China. The results obtained from these surveys not only deserve the revision of phylogeny and taxonomy of this family but also have revealed many new species including those that are useful in investigating mechanisms of speciation.This project aims to develop a new cooperative study on the evolutionary biology of drosophilids in the East Asian region. Specialists are expected to participate in the project to study their own or cooperative research themes of evolutionary interests such as taxonomy, phylogeny, mechanisms of speciation and molecular evolution. During the term of project (2003-2005), field surveys at many nature reserves in southeastern China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia were performed. As a result, many known species were added to the faunal list of these regions and specimens of many questionable or new species were collected. Efforts of the description of new species were made focusing the subfamily Steganinae that has long been left behind form the main taxonomic studies of drosophilids. Many new knowledge for speciation process of several closely related species groups of Drosophila were obtained from taxonomic, cytogenetic, population genetic and molecular phylogenetic studies.