Project Details
Projekt
The evolutionary history of Cochlearia (Brassicaceae) in Central Europe: Population and phylogenomics of a cold relic in a warming world
Applicant
Professor Dr. Marcus Koch
Subject Area
Evolution and Systematics of Plants and Fungi
Term
from 2014 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 268648732
The evolutionary history of Cochlearia (Brassicaceae) in Central Europe: Population- and phylogenomics of a cold relic in a warming world The genus Cochlearia represents an isolated evolutionary lineage that diverged from its Mediterranean sister clade during the Miocene and since that did not underwent any significant speciation until Pleistocene glaciation and deglaciation cycles. During the Pleistocene approximately 20 taxa evolved, with most of the species closely associated with cold-characterized habitats. Similar eco- and phenotypes of varying ploidy levels emerged and are scarcely distributed all over Europe and the Circumarctic. One sub-group of species is occurring mostly along coastal lines and a second sub-group is highly restricted to mountain and high elevation/altitude regions. The proposed project aims to unravel the evolutionary history of the various species, subspecies and cytotypes on a high-resolution-scale in space and time. The resulting evolutionary-systematic framework will lay the ground to study in particular hypotheses on parallel evolution and adaptation to cold environments with its respective characteristics and types of habitats (e.g. bedrock types, elevation, etc.). The Cochlearia study system provides the great opportunity to study closely linked traits and characters, because of various naturally occurring species pairs which are obviously, at least geographically, separated from each other. This will allow to study and test explicitly parallel evolution and adaptation. The data used herein are mostly based on next-generation-sequencing data utilizing information from all three plant genomes (nuclear, plastid, mitochondrial). These data will not only allow high-resolution analysis, but will also provide first access to thousands of genes and loci. The genus Cochlearia should be also developed towards a system to study in future molecular(genomic)-evolutionary signatures of cold adaptation. For this purposes the western Mediterranean sistergroup Ionopsidium is conceptually integrated to expand and stimulate future research accordingly.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
