Trait Evolution

Evolutionary analyses have widespread applications, ranging from reconstructing the origin and spread of novel plant pathogens or viruses like the HIV or H1N1, to understanding the evolution of important functional traits like the C4 photosynthetic pathway in plants. In plants, some unanswered questions include understanding which traits affect diversification, biogeographic patterns, response to climate change, co-evolution of pollinators and flowers or hosts and parasites, the influence of genetic architecture on morphological evolution and patterns of community assembly and interaction.

With the unprecedented increase in available nucleic acid sequence and phylogenetic data, commonly used software (often written for trees with less than a thousand taxa) do not handle memory management, optimization for speed, or other aspects of program design needed for the much bigger trees that are coming online; real-time use is no longer feasible for many users. The work done by this group in developing an infrastructure for downstream analysis of large trees is essential to maximizing the amount that can be learned about plant biology using phylogenetics and to capitalizing on the extensive work being done to optimize large-scale phylogeny construction.

The Trait Evolution working group is evaluating existing tools, adapting them to the scale of the problem and making them available to the wider community through iPlant’s Discovery Environment.