The Cnidarian Tree of Life Project

Our annual cnidarian tree of life meeting was held in July 2007 at the Virgin Islands Ecological Resource Station in St. John Virgin Islands, hosted CnidTol PI, Dr. Sandra Romano at UVA. This location was ideal because it was very isolated and served more as a retreat, enabling us to have meetings and discussions AND collect specimens without outside disturbances. At this meeting, we held a one-day student/postdoc symposium, where the students gave talks about their CnidTol projects. In addition, many of the PIs gave talks on their current findings. We had extensive discussions about our project goals, approaches, progress and plans for publications. We decided to shift some of our focus from PCR directed sequencing to phylogenomics of exemplar taxa. We intend to use the EST data to develop primers for more intensive sampling of taxa using a PCR directed approach. These new markers will likely be amplified and sequenced using an automated high-throughput approach at a commercial genomics facility. We will begin planning our year five symposium. Overall the meeting was a huge success. We all left the meeting with specific plans and goals for the following year that we agreed we would follow up on at the next meeting.