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January 2008 GW Biologists Connect the Branches on Evolutionary Tree of Life
By Jamie L. Freedman A team of evolutionary scientists in GW’s Department of Biological Sciences are engaged in the epic task of assembling a tree of life encompassing the majority of known species on earth. One of eight new University signature programs supported by a Board of Trustees-approved $4.5 million special endowment payout, the project aims to determine the historical relationships through time among the millions of diverse life forms on the planet. “We’re investigating one of the most profound ideas to emerge from modern science: that all of life, from the smallest microorganism to the largest vertebrate, is connected through genetic relatedness in a vast evolutionary tree,” says project director James Clark, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences. “You can look at our work as the roadmap to evolution.” The study of evolutionary history has long been a strength at GW. “Our curriculum is one of the few in the world specializing in the principles and methods of systematics and comparative biology, putting us at the forefront of the emerging field of biodiversity studies,” says Clark. Linked with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, GW’s Robert Weintraub Graduate Program in Systematics and Evolution focuses on exploring the diversity of organisms on earth, inferring their evolutionary relationships, and using these relationships to study how they evolved into their present forms. Eleven GW biology professors are involved in the tree of life project, including spider expert Gustavo Hormiga, fish ontogeny specialist Patricia Hernandez, and protist (one-cell organism) and invertebrate authority Diana Lipscomb. “We all work together within our specialty areas to interpret evolution, taking every piece of information that we can get about every living thing and analyzing it to discover how species evolved and how they are related,” says Clark, an internationally acclaimed paleontologist. Clark recently made headlines for leading the team that discovered the world’s most primitive tyrannosauroid and ceratopsian dinosaurs in the western Gobi Desert of China, revealing important clues to the origins of these groups. An integral part of the initiative involves tapping the expertise of cutting edge computer programmers and software developers to analyze the immense data sets, which contain large quantities of DNA sequence. It takes months to process the flood of new information pouring in about evolutionary relationships between species, says Clark. The group is, therefore, using a portion of the endowment money to fund a computer-savvy postdoctoral researcher. “We recently hired Dimitar Dimitrov for the two year assignment, who will help analyze the data using new computer paradigms and state-of-the-art programs,” Clark says. Funds are also supporting a series of high-level workshops and seminars by visiting experts in the field. “Ward Wheeler, chair of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, visited campus this past fall and gave two wonderful lectures on his path breaking work in scientific computation, and we’re in the process of recruiting several experts in the field for a symposium at GW later this year,” says Clark. According to Clark, half of the department’s 25 graduate students are involved in the tree of life project. “It’s a great experience for them,” he comments, noting that the venture provides research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students alike. “Their experiences will now be even richer,” Clark says, as they join faculty members in observing and collecting plants and animals at field sites around the globe, conducting detailed studies of anatomy and structure, extracting and comparing DNA in the sequencing lab, and analyzing data using newly developed computer models. “Few fields of biology integrate so many techniques and approaches.” Clark cautions that it may take generations to fully construct the tree of life. “It may not happen in our lifetime, but the more information that we have, the more stable the tree will become,” he says. “We’re part of a large scientific community engaged in this compelling project and are thrilled that this special funding will help us stay on the cutting edge of this exciting field.”
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