William Piel - US grants

A grant has been awarded to Dr. Derek Taylor and Dr. William Piel at the State University of New York at Buffalo to study and train new scientists in the biology, classification, and evolution of two families of water fleas (daphniids and bosminids). Although water fleas are model organisms in ecology and toxicology, the biodiversity of these crustaceans is poorly known. Also, scientists are often unable to identify accurately the species under study because of poor literature and a shortage of living experts. To remedy this situation, the PI's aim to apply their expertise in water flea biology, morphology, DNA analysis, and bioinformatics to produce modern taxonomic studies of water fleas and train new experts. Hypotheses for understanding processes that affect species and genetic diversity, such as the transfer of genes among species by hybridization, will also be tested.

The PI's expect that an improved detailed biological framework for water fleas will have broad use in industry, education, government, and scientific research. These crustaceans are some of the most important subjects for freshwater toxicology and for understanding the environmental effects of human activities on lakes and wetlands. Indeed, filter-feeding water fleas are among the only known animals that can clear pollution-caused algal blooms in lakes. Moreover, water fleas are a critical part of freshwater ecosystems as most freshwater fish species and many bird species depend on water fleas as a significant source of food. In addition to the above goals, the PI's will produce a web site targeting high school students so as to cultivate interest in the biology of water fleas. Two graduate students will be trained in the systematics and taxonomy of these crustaceans. Finally, international collaborations will be fostered and at least one expert from an under-represented group will be trained.

The AToL (Assembling the Tree of Life ) is a large-scale collaborative research effort sponsored
by the National Science Foundation to reconstruct the evolutionary origins of all living things. Currently 31
projects involving 150+ PIs are underway generating novel data including studies of bacteria, microbial eukaryotes, vertebrates, flowering plants and many more. The data being generated by these projects include and are not limited to: (i) Specimens and their provenance including collection information, voucher deposition, etc.; (ii) Phenotypic descriptions and their provenance; (iii) Genotypic descriptions and their provenance; (iv) Interpretation of the primary measurements including homology ; (v) Estimates of phylogenies and methods employed; and (vi) Post-tree analyses such as character evolution hypotheses.
While the data collection, storage, and dissemination within each projects are well coordinated, there is a critical need to develop the infrastructure to integrate all ATOL data sources, allowing the individual efforts to become multipliers for global hypotheses. Furthermore, as the projects continue to expand and address diverse corners of the Tree of Life, efficient project management will be greatly aided by workflow and data management tools targeted towards the ATOL problem domain. The project will develop new, compact, abstract data models for phylogenetics, leveraging use cases from a broad survey of empirical projects. The integration system will develop novel mappings between different phylogenetic data domains, and allow individual projects to join a network of integrated databases in an incremental manner. The data provenance system, which allows tracking of how each data object was created, will be unique to
systematics data management. The provenance system will not only allow tracking of what kinds of decisions were made in producing a particular tree or a particular column of a data matrix, but will also allow tracking of alternative data lineages such that, for example, different opinions on character homology might be tracked. The results of the research will be delivered in robust software tools that can be used by the entire evolutionary biology community. The study will develop a community-based formal model of data objects used in systematics, primarily through a continuing set of workshops. This activity will not only develop new data management tools, but will also have the effect of synthesizing disparate views of the phylogenetics research domains. The results of the system will be extensible to other domains of evolutionary biology, thereby contributing to the broader mission of evolutionary synthesis. The project will also provide training for the general systematics community in latest database technologies. Finally, by leveraging existing outreach efforts at the Penn Center for Bioinformatics, the project will link to other biological database efforts in genomics and biomedical sciences, disseminating phylogenetic information to the broad biomedical research community.

Antónia Monteiro and William Piel
Proposal number: IOS-0818731
"The evolution of serial homology: a case study with butterfly eyespots."

The bodies of complex organisms have been found to reuse developmental structures, such as teeth, vertebra, and ribs, in order to build "serially" repeated parts or processes. This composite or modular design suggests that certain genetic programs are redeployed multiple times in different places during the developing embryo. It remains to be understood how such modules come to be redeployed over the course of evolutionary diversification. This project aims to explore the evolutionary and developmental origin of complex repeated structures by studying serially-repeated "eyespot" patterns in the wings of butterflies. The researchers will assemble a large phylogenetic tree of nymphalid butterfly species, photograph and code their wing patterns with respect to the presence or absence of spots or eyespots, and use comparative methods to infer how eyespots evolved. In addition, the evolution of the eyespot gene developmental "network" will be investigated by monitoring the expression of four candidate network genes in twenty species chosen on the basis of phylogenetic distribution of wing pattern evolution.

This project has considerable educational Broader Impacts over a wide range of educational levels, supporting a graduate student, postdoc, and several undergraduate work-study students. Moreover, several New Haven high school student researchers will be involved through "Evolutions", the Peabody Museum's outreach program to city youth. This project will also generate a publicly accessible high-resolution image database of butterfly species (ca. 8,000 images from 1,000 nymphalid species), a large phylogeny of nymphalids, and the first database for gene expression images in the Lepidoptera. In addition, interactive web-accessible animations will be produced and incorporated into the exhibits of the Peabody Museum. This software will illustrate the diversity of nymphalid wing patterns and will animate the evolution of eyespot changes on phylogeny. This exhibit will introduce the public to the diversity and evolution of wing patterns, the evolution of individuation of repeated modules, and the evolution of morphological novelties such as eyespots.

The genus Viburnum contains some 170 woody plant species in temperate and subtropical forests around the Northern Hemisphere and in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Over 70 Viburnum species are used in horticulture, and many are ecologically important. Building on years of prior research, and based directly upon herbarium specimens and new collections, the goal of this project is to resolve all remaining species-level taxonomic problems and to produce a comprehensive description of the entire group, with geographic range maps and richly-illustrated interactive identification keys that can be deployed on the web and in the field. All data will be internet-accessible and integrated into global biodiversity databases.

This project will produce a global treatment of a widespread, taxonomically confusing, and horticulturally important plant lineage. In doing so, it will generate data and informatics tools of general value to the scientific community. This work will greatly increase the value of Viburnum as a model for addressing fundamental issues in evolutionary biology, ecology, and global change. The project will be transformative in modeling the use of knowledge of evolutionary relationships in producing a species-level taxonomic monograph. It will provide hands-on training in modern, collaborative, cyber-enabled systematic biology to students at all levels.