Associate Professor Keith Barker

These researchers are inferring phylogenetic relationships among all bird species using large (up to ~10,000 species and up to ~5 megabases) molecular datasets. MSI resources are critical both in the assembly and analysis of these large taxon sets and genome-scale data matrices. The datasets being analyzed are among the largest ever obtained or analyzed in addressing questions of bird phylogeny, and significant analytical resources are necessary in order to accomplish this task. Using these phylogenies, these researchers will be inferring the correlation between sexual selection (as inferred by sexual dichromatism) and diversification, estimating the impact of intercontinental dispersal on subsequent diversification rates, estimating the timing of intercontinental and continent-island dispersal events, and exploring environmental and biotic correlates of cooperative breeding behavior in birds. These analyses will be the most comprehensive tests of these hypotheses to date, and the first based on complete species-level sampling of any group. This will represent a significant advance in the fields of ornithology, biogeography, and evolutionary biology.

In addition to this project, members of this group are using MSI resources for other work, such as analyzing patterns of global raptor community diversity both in terms of evolutionary and morphological disparity, and comparative transcriptomics of birds on an urban-rural gradient, including assembling and annotating a draft reference genome and analyzing RNA-seq data for four species of birds.