Green Plant Evolution

Estimating and dating the plant Tree of Life

There are contentious relationships, unexplored patterns of trait evolution, disparate diversification rates, and variation in rates of evolution that remain open for investigation in plants. Although these broad studies are not the current focus of my research, I enjoy participating in such large-scale phylogenomic efforts such as 1KP ¹ and GoFlag ² that not only seek to investigate phylogenetic relationships, but also build the necessary resources for the scientific community to rigorously test phylogenetic hypotheses. Large collections of plant sequence data can then be applied to address basic questions in molecular evolution ³. I also try to stay involved in some plant genomic projects ⁴.

My research interests are currently focused on divergence time estimation ⁵. I am now using data generated from these large phylogenomic investigations to date the plant tree of life with multilocus nuclear datasets. Although there is a long legacy of divergence time studies in plants, there is a bit of a non-independence issue because nearly all investigations are based on the same chloroplast data mined from genbank. LArge collections of nuclear data provide an opportunity to demonstrate the effects of concatenation on divergence time estimation when incomplete lineage sorting is high, or when there are drastic shifts in life history traits or population size.