Project title
Testing links between life-history and genome evolution
Collaborators and funding
- The University of Sydney
- The University of Melbourne
- Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP240102805; http://www.arc.gov.au/
Contact(s)
- Maxim Adams, maxim.adams@sydney.edu.au
- Nathan Lo, nathan.lo@sydney.edu.au
Project description and aims
Our aims are to:
- Assemble high-quality genomes from species across the subfamily Panesthiinae with which to investigate the presence of genome-wide parallel evolution associated with soil-burrowing behaviour. If detected, this would represent among the first evidence that complex behavioural traits can emerge via parallel molecular trajectories.
- Assemble a high-quality reference genome for the Japanese termite Glyptotermes nakajimai against which to align and call genome-wide SNPs in samples across the species’ range. These data will then be used to investigate population structure, inbreeding and genetic diversity in different colonies and populations. When combined with karyotype data, we will novelly test for an association between inbreeding and neo-sex chromosome formation.
- Perform maximum-likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic analyses to contextualise the previous results against the lineages’ evolutionary histories. These methods will also shed light into the biogeographic origins of the species.
We request >= 128 GB of RAM (due to the computational demands of these bioinformatic pipelines) and >= 2 TB of storage (due to the large size of raw genomic data). Requested dependencies include: GATK, PLINK, StringTie, Flye, bedtools, samtools, MrBayes, BEAST, IQ-TREE and STRUCTURE.
How is ABLeS supporting this work?
This project is supported by the Production Bioinformatics scheme provided by ABLeS, providing access to compute and storage resources at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.
Expected outputs enabled by participation in ABLeS
Publications in scientific journals such as Current Biology, Molecular Biology and Evolution, PNAS, Evolution.
These details have been provided by project members at project initiation. For more information on the project, please consult the contact(s) or project links above.