Project description
Unravelling the evolution of the Physalideae tribe
The Solanaceae family, home to tomatoes and peppers, offers unique insights into biogeography and evolution but presents challenges in molecular dating. Within this family, the Physalideae tribe, with around 300 species, showcases a remarkable feature: the inflated fruiting calyx. This structure, seen in ancient fossils from South America, suggests the region as the ancestral origin of Solanaceae. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SOLgenbio project aims to unravel the evolutionary and biogeographic history of Physalideae. By integrating fossil data, morphology, and museum genomics, researchers will construct a comprehensive phylogeny. The project investigates how the inflated calyx influenced diversification and dispersal rates, shedding light on how these traits shaped the global distribution of physaloids.
Objective
The nightshade family, Solanaceae, at once illustrates the common challenges of molecular dating and presents a prime opportunity for expanding knowledge of biogeography and evolutionary history. Its most widely diverse tribe, Physalideae, contains roughly 300 species mostly distributed in South America, half of them with fruit key innovations known as the inflated fruiting calyx. The same structures are present in the oldest fossils of the family, recently discovered in the south of South America, reinforcing the idea of this area as the ancestral zone of origin and diversification for Solanaceae. After decades of molecular phylogenetics and fossil discoveries, I aim to introduce an integrative approach to disentangle the evolutionary and biogeographic history of the physaloids in the light of fossils, morphology, and museum genomics. To approach this, I will first infer a calibrated total-evidence phylogeny for the Physalideae including fossils and extant taxa. Building on these results, I will estimate diversification rates to test whether phenotypic changes in the fruiting calyx inflation affected them. Finally, and also using the calibrated phylogeny, I will reconstruct the ancestral areas of distribution of Physalideae, and I will test whether there is a correlation between the inflated calyx and the macroevolutionary dispersal rates. The convergence of genomics, paleobotany, and evolutionary morphology will allow us to test if the inflation of the fruiting calyx may have spurred the diversification and distribution of physaloids over the Americas and across continents, shaping the biogeographic patterns we see today.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgenetics
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiological morphologycomparative morphology
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulturefruit growing
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geography
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
00014 HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Finland