Seminar "Improvement and application of ancient DNA methods to study spider radiations on Pacific islands" by Dr. Cotoras

Ecology and Evolution Unit (Mikheyev Unit) would like to invite you to a seminar.

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Date:   April 19th, Thursday

Time:   2 pm – 3pm

Venue: Meeting Room C016, Level C, Lab1

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Independent colonization events on volcanic islands could be considered as natural experiments. Questions about origin of colonization or comparing diversification rates could be addressed on these natural settings. The Tetragnatha spiders are an ideal model system to exanimate these general questions using molecular phylogenies. However, in order to do it, it is necessary to overcome 2 main technical challenges. The first is the lack of a reference genome to compare with and the second is the fact that many museum samples are not preserved on ideal conditions for DNA sequencing. This seminar consists on three parts where I show my ongoing research on island diversification of Tetragnatha. In the first part I present the genome assembly of a Hawaiian Tetragnatha species, referring to the different library preparation and sequencing methods used. Then, in the second part, I discuss the evaluation of different DNA extraction methods for museum specimens. Finally, integrating the findings from the previous sections, I present a molecular phylogeny for the Tetragnatha species present on the Pacific Rim. The current results highlight the difficulties of genome assembly on non-model organisms and present unexpected findings on the Pacific-wide phylogeny of the group.

Biography:

Darko D. Cotoras is a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences. He is interested on the historical biogeography and diversification of organisms in the Pacific Rim, particularly arachnids. He did a PostDoc between the University of California, Santa Cruz and the California Academy of Sciences applying ancient DNA methods to museum specimens. Previously, got his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley working on population genetics of spiders in Hawai’i. His Master degree is from the Universidad de Chile, where he worked on Evolutionary Developmental Biology. He got his bachelor in Biology at the same institution.