2017 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
Revealing evolutionary history of corals using whole genomes of five Acropora species
| Project/Area Number |
17J00557
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| Research Institution | Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University |
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Principal Investigator |
MAO Yafei 沖縄科学技術大学院大学, 科学技術研究科, 特別研究員(DC1)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2017-04-26 – 2020-03-31
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| Keywords | Introgression / Gene tree / Species tree / Phylonetwork |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Understanding speciation and diversification is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Reef-building corals contribute to tropical ecosystem, supporting 30% marine organisms. Yet, we have little knowledge about the evolutionary history of reef-building corals. Acropora is one of the most dominant and diversified reef-building coral genus in Indo-Pacific Ocean, in order to understand its evolutionary history, I used five Acropora genomes to infer gene trees, species and phylonetwork to show introgression occurred in Acropora. Importantly, recent study showed that introgression play an important role in speciation and diversification, therefore, testing introgression in Acopora is important for coral research and coral conservation.
In this physical year, I have done the gene tree reconstruction, species tree inferences, and phylogenetic network inferences with comparative genomic analysis to show that introgression occurred in Acropora. This work has been published in Current Biology (Mao et al, Current Biology, 2018).
In addition, I used genomic data to test the hypothesis that Whole-genome duplication (WGD) occurred in Acropora with the dS-based method. WGD is regarded as a crucial evolutionary force on speciation and diversification.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
This work is going well as the original plan. I used genomic data to infer phylogenetic network and showed that introgression occurred in Acropora. This work has been published in Current Biology (Mao et al, Current Biology, 2018).
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I will continue to work on investigating evolutionary history of Acropora and will try to write a bioinformatic pipeline for this work. In addition, I will test the hypothesis that WGD occurred in Acropora
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