A phylogenetic analysis of genome size evolution and social structure in Hymenoptera

Monday, November 11, 2024

10:30 AM – 10:42 AM MST

Location: Phoenix Convention Center, 223, PCC

Presenting Author(s)

OF

Olivia Frary

Utah Valley University
Provo, Utah

Co-Author(s)

Carl Hjelmen (he/him/his)

Assistant Professor
Utah Valley University
Salt Lake City, Utah

Genome size varies considerably between and among species across the tree of life. Within insects, there is a more than 200-fold variation in genome size. However, the amount of DNA an organism has does not correlate with its complexity; for examples some grasshoppers have six times more DNA than a human. There are many hypotheses for how and why genome size changes but overall, results of tests of these hypotheses are not consistent between groups of organisms. Here, we will be discussing genome size evolution within the order Hymenoptera, which ranges in genome size from 98 Mbp to 4,400 Mbp with widespread variation in social structure from solitary to eusocial. In order to investigate these questions, we utilize comparative phylogenetic methods to focus our analyses on genome size compared to differences between families and sociality structures. We used lab-developed R scripts to gather sequence data from NCBI GenBank for species that have available genome size estimates to reconstruct the hymenopteran phylogeny with Bayesian methodologies. This has resulted in a tree with over 100 species from 19 families, and 85 genera. Patterns of change and phylogenetic signal were measured using metrics such as Pagel’s lambda, PGLS (Phylogenetic Generalized Least Squares), and BAMM (Bayesian Analysis of Macroevolutionary Mixtures). This data will be compared to previous genome size work in other insect orders.