The Cnidarian Tree of Life Project

Postdoc, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas

Phylogenetic Analysis of Medusozoans

My role in the tree of life project is to develop secondary structure models for three rRNA genes (28S, 18S and 16S) which are currently being used to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships within the Medusozoa. Secondary structures can be used as guidelines to improve the assessment of positional homology in DNA alignments resulting in more accurate reconstructions. Also, recently developed models that take in account the lack of independence among nucleotide positions have been shown to provide resolution of deeper nodes and could help resolve basal relationships. This could be particularly important for the hydrozoan clade Hydroidolina, which has proven to be very difficult to resolve.

I addition I am designing and implementing an Access database to manage the specimens collected and data generated through Cnidtol.