Museomics & Phylogenomics
Trait evolution, biome shifts, and spatiotemporal diversification in Neotropical tortoise beetles
The project focuses on Dorynotini, a Neotropical tribe of tortoise beetles, to explore trait evolution, including antipredator traits, in relation to shifts between savanna/dry forest and tropical rainforest biomes. Moreover, the project also seeks to understand the tribe’s ancestral range/biome, the role of seasonally dry tropical forests for dispersal across South America, and how the morphological diversity on the Caribbean islands evolved. The PhD student will engage in diverse activities spanning fossil description, alpha taxonomy, phylogenomics, including bioinformatics. Collaborating with institutions worldwide, including the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Prague National Museum, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, The University of Memphis, and Leibniz-Institut zur Analyse des Biodiversitätswandels, the student will conduct fieldwork across South America and the Caribbean. The project is fully funded for all proposed activities.
Some collaborators:
Marianne Espeland, Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig
Duane Mckenna, University Memphis
Lukas Sekerka, National Museum, Prague, Czech Republic
Don Windsor, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Sonja Wedmann, Senckenberg Research Institute
Towards a stable classification of Cassidini Chapuis (Chrysomelidae: Cassidinae) using low coverage whole genome sequencing
The tribe Cassidini Chapuis stands out as the most diverse within Cassidinae, encompassing nearly one-third of the subfamily’s known diversity. With 87 genera and over 2000 species, it is the only tribe distributed across both the Old World and the New World (Borowiec & Świętojańska, 2024). Despite its prominence, systematic research has been remarkably limited, and its classification remains a subject of taxonomic debate and systematic uncertainty, primarily due to the inherent challenges posed by its reliance on homoplastic traits.
Here, we propose: (1) Utilizing lcWGS to assess the monophyly of Cassidini sensu López-Pérez et al. (2018), and (2) investigating the inter-tribal relationships within Cassidinae. The outcomes of this pilot project will serve as a baseline for understanding the tribal relationships to Cassidini, enabling to target of key questions to resolve the taxonomy and classification of the tribe and subfamily and facilitate a more in-depth exploration of specific branches of the phylogenetic tree.
Exploring Plant-Insect Interactions: A DNA metabarcoding approach on herbarium specimens to detect insect interactions through feeding marks and galls
Museum collections, with their broad representation of target taxa and geographic ranges, may provide invaluable data for reconstructing networks and provide a practical solution for studying plant-insect interactions. Specifically, herbarium specimens function as archives, preserving a wealth of information about organisms that live on and in plants, including those engaged in feeding on and breeding in them, such as in galls (= insect-induced housing structures on leaves and flowers). Thus, the study of such specimens may provide a detailed record of the intricate relationships between plants and insects.
Here we propose testing metabarcoding of herbarium specimens, targeting galls and leaves containing feeding traces, to investigate and detect insect interactions in collaboration with Herbarium Haussknecht Jena and Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin. We aim to investigate three distinct knowledge levels of these interactions found in the herbarium, selecting insect-plant relationships with known partners for “benchmarking” (in 2 & 3): 1) galls with unknown associated insects, 2) galls with known associated insects of diverse orders, and 3) feeding traces, focusing on traces found on leaves of the flowering plant order Zingiberales, known to be living sites for the subclade of leaf-mining beetles (>6,300 species, subfamily Cassidinae Gyllenhal, 1813) and producing characteristic feeding tracks.
