The floral evolution of Ericales

这个DFG项目的目标是研究杜鹃花目植物的花进化。它们以其高度的花多样性和由此导致的该目缺乏统一的形态特征而引人注目。因此，寻找共享衍生(同形)字符是这个项目的目标之一。这些字符的发现不仅将加深我们对Ericales的理解，也将加深我们对其最接近的亲缘群体，如Asterales的理解。另一个目标是利用现存和灭绝的Ericalean物种的数据重建Ericales的祖先花及其亚群。这两个目标彼此紧密联系，将使用迄今最大的Ericales的形态和分子数据集进行研究。例如，使用祖先状态重建的结果，我可以推断左右形花(具有一条反射轴的花)在Ericales系统发育中是否进化了一次或多次，以及这是在地球历史上何时进化的。所获得的洞察力将进一步了解Ericales中的花进化，并可能揭示适用于所有开花植物的花进化的一般原理。此外，该项目旨在评估“藻毒素”方法的性能，当它用于焦点组而不是所有开花植物时，在这种情况下是杜鹃花属植物。“Pirhloscan”是一种推断化石在特定类群系统发育中的位置的新方法。在这种多步骤方法中，对化石的所有可能位置进行比较，并在每一步中缩小参考组的范围。首先是对所有开花植物的比较，然后是亚类，如Ericales目。目的是比较使用“藻类扫描”恢复的系统发育位置与目前使用的传统方法的位置。对于进化生物学家来说，“藻毒素”是一种强大的新工具，因为它消除了通常在手动将化石分配给一组化石时所涉及的偏见。这是因为每个可能的职位都是用基于计算机的方法进行测试和评分，这样就可以比较分数。总而言之，这个项目的目标是使用来自活的和化石物种的数据重建祖先的Ericales花。以及使用“系统扫描”方法仔细地将埃里卡利化石分配到系统发育中的位置。

The goal of this DFG-project is the study of floral evolution in the plant order Ericales. They are notable for their high floral diversity and the resulting the lack of uniting morphological characters for the order. Therefore, the search for shared derived (synapomorphic) characters is one the goals of this project. The discovery of such characters will deepen our understanding not only of Ericales, but also of its nearest related groups, e.g. Asterales. An additional goal is the reconstruction of the ancestral flower of Ericales and their subgroups using data from living and extinct Ericalean species. Theses two goals are tightly connected with one another and will be studied using the largest morphological and molecular dataset for Ericales, yet. For example, using the results from the ancestral state reconstruction I can infer whether zygomorphic flowers (flowers with one axis of reflection) have evolved once or multiple times within the Ericales phylogeny and when this has been during earth’s history. The insights gained will further the understanding of the floral evolution within Ericales and potentially uncover general principles of floral evolution that stand true for all flowering plants. Furthermore, this project aims to evaluate the performance of the “phyloscan”-method, when it is used for a focal group instead of all flowering plants, in this case Ericales. “pyhloscan” is a new approach to a infer the position of fossils in the phylogeny of a given group. In this multi-step approach all possible positions of a fossils are compared and in each step the reference group is narrowed down. First is always the comparison to all flowering plants and then sub-groups, such as orders like Ericales. The goal is the comparison of the phylogenetic positions recovered using “phyloscan” with those of conventional methods currently used. The “phyloscan” is a powerful new tool for evolutionary biologists because it eliminates the bias usually involved when manually assigning a fossil to a group. That is because each possible position is tested and scored in a computer-based approach, so that scores can be compared. Summarising, the goals of this project are the reconstruction of the ancestral Ericales flower using data from living and fossil species. As well as the careful assignment of Ericalean fossils to positions within the phylogeny using the “phyloscan”-method.