46. Evolutionary Genomics of Australian Plant Ecology

Organised by Rose Andrew, University of British Columbia and Bill Foley, Australian National University. First meeting held 9-12 November 2008 at Australian National University in Canberra.

PARTICIPANTS MAY INCLUDE Rose Andrew - U British Columbia (Canada) (Leader) Bill Foley - Australian National U (Leader) Gavin Moran - CSIRO Forestry and Forest Products Hans Lambers - U Western Australia Andrew Lowe - U Adelaide Lindell Bromham - Australian National U Mike Crisp - Australian National U Rene Vaillancourt - U Tasmania German Spangenberg - DPI Victoria, Latrobe U Meg Woolfit - U Queensland

GOAL

The goal of Working Group 46 is to use genomics to enhance our understanding of the evolution of Australian plant ecology. We consider the use of genome resources (such as microarrays, genome and transcriptome sequence data), evolutionary genomics and molecular evolution approaches to identify and study genes that have contributed to ecologically important traits and syndromes in the Australian flora.

The group includes ecologists, physiologists, geneticists and evolutionary biologists, as asking the right questions is as important as finding the right methodology. We would like to add bioinformatics expertise to the group in the future.

In our first meeting, we discussed the kinds of questions we were interested in using genomics to address, the most sensible approaches to these questions and which of the necessary sets of data were already available and which were still needed. We also considered the analysis of next-generation sequencing data obtained for closely related species. Often such data are obtained for other purposes (such as SNP discovery), but may be used to ask whether sequences have diverged neutrally or have been subject to selection.

Since genomic data are still expensive, good phylogenetic and trait background information are required to focus sequencing effort. We have begun to compile this information for phytochemical traits in *Eucalyptus* and phosphorus-related traits in Proteaceae.

Last updated January 2009