Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

January 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Poster: Genome Sequencing & ESTs
            

TOWARD RESOLUTION OF THE FUZZY NODES IN GREEN PLANT PHYLOGENY

¹ Dept of Botany, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-5325

² University Herbarium, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94706

³ Dept of Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901-4709

⁴ Dept of Biology, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322-5305

⁵ Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8337

⁶ Bigelow Laboratories for Ocean Sciences, West Boothbay Harbor, ME 04575

We are funded to resolve the primary pattern of evolutionary diversification among green plants, and establish a model for doing so that will be applicable to other groups of organisms with long evolutionary history. To achieve this goal we will 1) complete a matrix of whole genome sequences for chloroplast and mitochondria and develop either nuclear or organellar bacterial artifical chromosome, BAC, libraries for about 50 representatives of the critical deep-branching lineages of green plants; 2) produce a comprehensive set of comparable morphological and ultrastructural data for these same taxa; 3) incorporate inferences from across the phylogenetic hierarchy in green plants using methods designed to permit scaling across studies. We shall indicate how this work will link to other research being conducted on green plants and various scales, especially the concatenation of our data sets with theirs. We will present the fuzzy nodes we have chosen to resolve and discuss our choices of taxa in this preliminary report. Funded by NSF's Tree of Life Program, 2002-2005.