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Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity

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Student Competition

Undergrad Poster Competition: SysEB, Evolution, Phylogenetics, and Systematics

D3225: Decoding Diptera: Unraveling chromosome evolution across fly families

Monday, November 11, 2024
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM MST
Location: Phoenix Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 6, PCC
Poster Display Student Competition
The order Diptera is known for its low variability in chromosome numbers,  with haploid numbers rarely exceeding six, likely due to constraints of the Muller elements.  However, despite the lack of diversity, Diptera has been shown to have a high rate of chromosome evolution, with a significant bias toward fusions (Alfieri et al. 2023). This data suggests that Diptera genome structure may be more variable than previously believed. My research aims to investigate and compare chromosome number changes between dipteran families and identify taxonomic groups that may be of further interest. Additionally, due to the lack of a comprehensive and up-to-date phylogeny with relevant species, I developed an R package to aid in the creation of an updated tree. This package scrapes sequence data from NCBI GenBank and formats sequences for use in phylogeny reconstruction. Using maximum likelihood methods, and gene information from NCBI GenBank, the tree is comprised of over 800 species across 35 families, with haploid chromosome numbers ranging from three to thirteen. Using the chromePlus package in R (Blackmon et al. 2019), and karyotype information from the open-source Diptera Karyotype database (Morelli et al. 2022) , I performed comparative phylogenetic analyses to explore the patterns and rate of chromosome evolution across these families. This effort will result in enhanced insights into the evolutionary history of Diptera and can be used in further comparative research.