Qian ZHANG

PhD project: Breeding system evolution in Moraceae
Supervisor: Hervé Sauquet

Flowers are the reproductive organs of angiosperms. There are four breeding systems in family Moraceae (monecy, dioecy, gynodioecy, and androdioecy), which includes 39 genera and ca. 1125 species. Among them, the fig genus, Ficus (ca. 750 spp.), is well known for its coevolution with its wasp pollinators. There are two breeding systems in Ficus, monoecy and gynodioecy, and monoecy has been suggested to be ancestral. In this project, I will investigate breeding system evolution in Ficus and Moraceae and its relationship with climate to answer a number of key questions: How did breeding systems evolve in Ficus and Moraceae and did they influence diversification rates in the group? Did the origin and transition of breeding systems in Ficus and Moraceae correlate with historical climate change? To answer these questions, new species-level dated phylogenetic trees of Ficus and Moraceae will be reconstructed using available sequence data and a new backbone tree from the Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) data. Ancestral state reconstruction of breeding systems and diversification rate shifts in Ficus and Moraceae will be inferred with state-of-the-art methods.

Funding: China Scholarship Council

Kong, D., C. Ma, Q. Zhang, L. Li, X. Chen, H. Zeng, and D. Guo. 2014. Leading dimensions in absorptive root trait variation across 96 subtropical forest species. New Phytologist 203:863-872.

Li, L., M. L. McCormack, C. G. Ma, D. L. Kong, Q. Zhang, X. Y. Chen, H. Zeng, U. Niinemets, and D. L. Guo. 2015. Leaf economics and hydraulic traits are decoupled in five species-rich tropical-subtropical forests. Ecology Letters 18:899-906.

Last updated on 14/03/2016