NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2016

Kanda Kojun, Flagstaff AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Postdoctoral Fellow: Kojun Kanda Proposal Number: 1612282 This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2017, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow to take transformative approaches to grand challenges in biology that employ biological collections in highly innovative ways. The title of the research plan for this fellowship to Kojun Kanda is "Reconstructing global beetle phylogeny one museum at a time: using high-throughput sequencing of museum specimens to resolve relationships between rare taxa." The host institution for this fellowship is Northern Arizona University, and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Aaron Smith. This goal of this study is to elucidate the evolutionary history and species boundaries in the darkling beetle tribe Asidini (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae), using molecular and morphological data from museum specimens. Many species of insects are described from relatively few specimens, thus hindering studies reliant upon DNA sequence data such as evolutionary analyses and identifying cryptic species. Recent advances in DNA sequencing and analysis techniques have opened the door to accessing molecular data in museum specimens, but these tools are not yet regularly applied to studies of the most diverse group of eukaryotic organisms, the insects. Because specimens of this group are extremely rare in collections, the Fellow is using the majority of the world's holdings of Asidini from African, European, North American and South American museums including the Ditsong Museum of South Africa, California Academy of Sciences, and National Museum of Natural History. In addition to elucidating the phylogeny of an important insect group, the Fellow is refining protocols to use molecular data from insect specimens preserved in collections and providing a framework for molecular-based taxonomic and evolutionary studies for rare groups that are reliant upon natural history collections. The Fellow is being trained in techniques used to acquire DNA sequence data from small museum-preserved insects, such as extracting and sequencing highly degraded DNA, and utilizing bioinformatics techniques to maximize recovery of phylogenetically useful data. Broader impacts to the scientific community include developing protocols and pipelines to help synthesize different data types extracted from museum specimens, including morphology, biogeographic and seasonality information, and molecular sequence data. Additionally, the Fellow is training undergraduates in modern collection-based research techniques by mentoring them in research projects and through collection- and specimen-based courses. A public online portal is also being created to share results of the project with the broader public.