Project description
Exploring comparative evolution with the help of penguins
Penguins have evolved from flying seabirds to flightless marine creatures, and they are very sensitive to climate and environmental change. Therefore, they represent a great opportunity for scientists to study comparative evolution, biogeography, adaptation and demography. The EU-funded GENEDAMP project aims to explore comparative evolution and adaptation across all penguin species by using full genome data. Within this scope, it will span 27 modern penguin lineages (including all extant and recently extinct taxa). The project is expected to provide revolutionary insights into three key aspects of penguin evolutionary history: drivers of diversification and biogeography, genomic adaptations to diverse environments and climate driven demography.
Objective
Penguins are a diverse order of Southern Hemisphere seabirds, with breeding ranges spanning from the tropical Galápagos Islands to the sea-ice around Antarctica. Sharing a common ancestor with Procellariiformes, penguins transitioned about 60 million years ago from flying seabirds to powerful, flightless marine divers. They have subsequently evolved many unique adaptations for an aquatic environment, including densely-packed waterproof and insulating feathers, visual sensitivity, dense bones, stiff wing joints and an enhanced thermoregulation system. Lineage-specific adaptations have also evolved, and include different body size, breeding strategies, bill morphologies and plumage. This unique evolutionary history, together with their high sensitivity to climate and environmental change, make penguins an excellent group for studying comparative evolution, biogeography, adaptation and demography. However, this has proven challenging. For example, several studies have attempted to pinpoint the timing, and thereby the drivers of recent speciation events and biogeography, morphological/physiological adaptations and historical demographic trends in penguins, yet no consensus has been reached. Most studies have been limited by the genetic markers available (short mitochondrial or nuclear sequences, mitochondrial genomes, single nucleotide polymorphisms), or have been biased towards primarily Antarctic species. To finally resolve such questions, it is necessary to explore comparative evolution and adaptation across all penguin species using full genome data. This project will achieve this through analysing a new set of high-coverage genomes spanning 27 modern penguin lineages (including all extant and recently extinct taxa). In doing so, we will provide revolutionary insights into three key aspects of penguin evolutionary history: 1) drivers of diversification and biogeography; 2) genomic adaptations to diverse environments; and 3) climate driven demography.
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 scienceszoologyornithology
- social sciencessociologydemography
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsnucleotides
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsgenomes
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geography
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
1165 Kobenhavn
Denmark