Genomic and phylogenetic approaches for investigating plant biodiversity and evolution

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

A major focus of my research program is to reconstruct deep and recent phylogenetic (genealogical) relationships of the land plants, the organisms that underpin terrestrial ecology. Our phylogenetic analysis and comparative genomic approaches will provide a multidisciplinary framework to facilitate our understanding of major evolutionary transitions in plants, allow us to characterize species boundaries at a molecular level, and permit us to connect genomic data back to organismal biology. We will use cross-taxon transcriptome comparisons as an innovative approach to study major transitions in plant evolution. We will also mine transcriptome data sets to develop and apply nuclear-gene markers for detailed studies of local phylogenetic relationships and species boundaries in a novel early 'model plant' system, Trithuria (Hydatellaceae). The key evolutionary position of these aquatic plants, which branched close to the origin of the flowering plants, will facilitate predictions of gene function and evolution across the flowering plants as a whole. Finally, we will resolve resolving weaknesses in our understanding of the phylogeny of the monocot order Alismatales, a major land plant group that lives mostly in aquatic habitats, including our coastal environments. We will use large-scale surveys of whole plastid genomes to derive robust, densely sampled phylogenetic frameworks for this important group of plants. The proposed work includes considerable new training opportunities for students, including bioinformatic/ phylogenomic projects for undergraduate researchers.