Development and optimization of novel phylogenomic methods to elucidate diversity and evolution in the tribe Cichorieae (Compositae/sunflower family), providing key contributions to the Compositae family tree of life.

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The proposed project represents a novel and innovative part of our ongoing research on the systematics of the Cichorieae tribe in the mega-diverse flowering plant family Compositae (or Asteraceae, sunflower family). It represents our contribution to the international collaboration network working towards an improved understand of the Compositae tree of life (see Mandel & al. 2017).We plan to further develop a next generation sequencing (NGS) approach called target enrichment and hybrid capture that targets conserved loci of the nuclear genome for phylogenomic analyses. The method has already successfully been tested by the PI of the proposed project in the molecular lab and the proposed project is designed as a pilot study that will enable us to develop and increase the efficiency of the lab steps and data analyses. The proposed pilot project will focus on and conduct the deepest taxonomic sampling of the large subtribe Scorzonerinae (black salsify, cichory; tribe Cichorieae) to date that remains poorly understood. A major characteristic of the project is the collaboration with a student from Iran whose PhD focusses on the systematics of Scorzonera. The PhD student has already received financial support from Iran to come to Berlin to learn and apply the target enrichment and hybrid capture method to her systematic work on Scorzonera. The present proposal would support the molecular lab work. Moreover, the PhD student will provide deep taxonomic sampling of the genus from Iran that is a hotspot for Scorzonera diversity hosting many endemic species.The methods for analyses of target enrichment and hybrid capture data is continuously being developed; therefore, this project will also provide a robust dataset of Cichorieae to allow indepth assessment of the performance of the different types of bioinformatics analyses. We aim to develop a more stream lined approach for analyses of such datasets to facilitate our future work. This will also be relevant to the Asteraceae research community and plant systematists in general who are working on similar methods and datasets.