Collaborative Research: Phylogenetics, biogeography, and morphological evolution of the flowering plant genus Salvia (sages and relatives)

鼠尾草及其近缘植物(鼠尾草属)属于薄荷科植物，约有1000种，除了许多园林观赏植物外，还包括经济上重要的草本植物鼠尾草和迷迭香。鼠尾草在各种生境中发挥着重要的生态作用，包括为蝴蝶和飞蛾幼虫提供食物，为蜜蜂和其他传粉者提供花蜜来源。这项研究将重建不同鼠尾草物种之间的系谱关系，并解决有关该种群内花形和授粉机制进化的重要问题。威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校和内布拉斯加州大学科尔尼分校的本科生、研究生和博士后研究人员将接受广泛的形态和分子系统技能培训，威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校的本科生将通过计划中的顶石野外课程获得热带野外生物学经验。关于丹参的信息将通过一个面向专业植物学家和圣人爱好者的项目网站传播，而其他项目数据将通过公众可访问的数据库更广泛地展示。利用全基因组DNA序列数据和强大的计算资源重建系统发育关系的能力已经彻底改变了系统学领域。这些新的系统发育学现在提供了一个框架，以研究促进一个谱系内物种多样化的不同过程。鼠尾草(鼠尾草科)在世界范围内分布广泛，种类繁多，种类繁多，花卉和营养形态多样。这项研究将调查该属成员中存在的独特雄蕊特征的进化，并测试该特征的起源是否与物种形成率的增加有关。研究人员将对所描述的1000种鼠尾草中的约650种进行采样，并使用下一代测序方法利用450多个核基因和叶绿体基因组来估计丹参及其近亲之间的系统发育关系。然后，这一系统发育框架将被用来确定种群内物种形成率增加的时间和生物地理位置。然后，将在丹参系统发育的背景下对关键花卉特征的形态计量分析进行评估，以检验花卉特征的进化作为集团内关键创新的假设。

Sages and relatives (the flowering plant genus Salvia) within the mint family (Lamiaceae) comprises approximately 1000 species, including the economically important herbs sage and rosemary, in addition to many garden ornamentals. Sages play important ecological roles in a diversity of habitats, including providing food for butterfly and moth larvae, and nectar sources for bees and other pollinators. This study will reconstruct genealogical relationships among different sage species, and address important questions concerning the evolution of flower shape and pollination mechanisms within the group. Undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and University of Nebraska at Kearney will be trained in a broad range of morphological and molecular systematic skills, and University of Wisconsin, Madison undergraduate students will gain tropical field biology experience through a planned capstone field course. Information about Salvia will be disseminated through a project website geared towards professional botanists and sage enthusiasts, while other project data will be presented more broadly through publically-accessible databases. The ability to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships using genome-wide DNA sequence data and powerful computational resources has revolutionized the field of systematics. These new phylogenies now provide a framework to investigate the different processes that facilitate the diversification of species within a lineage. Salvia (Lamiaceae) has a worldwide distribution and diversified extensively, both in terms of the number of species, and the variety of floral and vegetative morphologies present within the group. This research will investigate the evolution of the unique staminal feature present in members of the genus, and test whether the origin of this character is correlated with an increase in rates of speciation. Researchers will sample about 650 of the 1000 described Salvia species and use Next Generation Sequencing approaches to estimate phylogenetic relationships among Salvia and close relatives using over 450 nuclear genes and the chloroplast genome. This phylogenetic framework will then be used to determine the timing and biogeographic location of increased rates of speciation within the group. Morphometric analyses of key floral features will then be evaluated within the context of the Salvia phylogeny to test the hypothesis that the evolution of floral features have served as key innovations within the group.