| 研究実績の概要 |
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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