Advancing ancestral graph theory of metacommunities and population genetic theory of polyploids

推进元群落祖先图论和多倍体群体遗传理论

• 批准号: RGPIN-2020-04151
• 负责人: Griswold, Cortland
• 金额: $ 2.04万
• 依托单位: University of Guelph
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=757627
• 关键词: Advancing; ancestral; graph; theory; metacommunities

Since the work of Darwin and Wallace, the discipline of evolutionary biology has sought to understand the history of life and the mechanisms that underlie the evolutionary process. My research group contributes to the field of evolutionary biology by developing theory in support of these goals. Under my previous Discovery Grant, my group derived a model of the ancestral history of an ecological community that includes the processes of natural selection and species interactions. Over the next five years, we seek to integrate this approach with classic phylogenetic models of historical processes, with the goal of developing a general theory that bridges recent and deep time. This will improve our ability to make inferences across different time scales to understand the processes that have shaped present-day ecological communities. Our model of the ancestral history of an ecological community also has immediate applications. For example, we seek to apply the model to gain insight into the nature of genomic content in prokaryotic microbes. This work will shed light on how horizontal gene transfer shapes genomic content that is shared and unshared among individuals of the same and different species within a prokaryotic community. Another area of application relates to the detection of microbial species within communities. The development of high--throughput DNA sequencing now makes it possible to sequence, in principle, an entire microbial community. Nevertheless, we sometimes fail to sequence DNA from species that are present due to limitations of the technology. We recently derived expectations for patterns of DNA sequence variation when lineages go unsequenced. In this grant, we seek to apply this theory to samples from nature to assess whether lineages have gone undetected. This work will have important implications for reducing uncertainty about the use of environmental DNA in ecological assessments and other research. A second, complementary arm of my research program is addressing long-standing questions about the processes that underlie evolution in polyploid species. An important gap in the literature has been models of selection across multiple regions of a polyploid species' genome. My research group has derived such a model, and we now seek to apply its insights to understand how recombination rates evolve in polyploids, and to identify processes that affect the regression of a polyploid to a lower ploidy state. This work will advance our fundamental knowledge of meiosis, selection and genome evolution in polyploids. My lab group seeks to think broadly and address important gaps in our understanding of evolution. We have ambitious goals for developing fundamental theory in evolutionary biology. The proposed research is expected to make a significant contribution to advancing our basic understanding of nature and our biological heritage.

自达尔文和华莱士的工作以来，进化生物学的学科一直试图了解生命的历史和进化过程的机制。我的研究小组通过发展理论来支持这些目标，为进化生物学领域做出了贡献。在我之前的发现补助金下，我的团队推导出了一个生态群落祖先历史的模型，其中包括自然选择和物种相互作用的过程。在接下来的五年里，我们寻求将这种方法与历史过程的经典系统发育模型相结合，目标是建立一个连接近代和深层时间的一般理论。这将提高我们在不同时间尺度上进行推断的能力，以了解塑造当今生态群落的过程。我们关于生态群落祖先历史的模型也有直接的应用。例如，我们试图应用该模型来深入了解原核微生物中基因组内容的性质。这项工作将阐明水平基因转移如何塑造基因组内容，这些内容在原核生物群落中相同和不同物种的个体之间是共享和非共享的。另一个应用领域涉及群落内微生物物种的检测。高通量DNA测序技术的发展，原则上使整个微生物群落的测序成为可能。然而，由于技术的限制，我们有时无法对现有物种的DNA进行测序。我们最近得出的预期模式的DNA序列变异时，血统去未测序。在这项研究中，我们试图将这一理论应用于自然界的样本，以评估血统是否未被发现。这项工作将对减少在生态评估和其他研究中使用环境DNA的不确定性产生重要影响。我的研究计划的第二个补充部分是解决关于多倍体物种进化过程的长期问题。文献中的一个重要空白是多倍体物种基因组多个区域的选择模型。我的研究小组已经推导出了这样一个模型，我们现在试图应用它的见解来了解重组率如何在多倍体中进化，并确定影响多倍体回归到较低倍性状态的过程。这项工作将推进我们的减数分裂，选择和多倍体基因组进化的基础知识。我的实验室小组寻求广泛的思考，并解决我们对进化的理解中的重要差距。我们有发展进化生物学基础理论的宏伟目标。这项拟议中的研究预计将为促进我们对自然和生物遗产的基本了解做出重大贡献。