Welcome to the LODGE

• There are over 30,000 species of fishes, more than all other bony vertebrates combined – what processes have given rise to this incredible diversity?
• What are the evolutionary relationships among organisms?
• How does speciation occur?
• What is the influence of geographic environmental variation in on patterns of biodiversity? And how do changes in environmental conditions affect organismal distributions?
• How does the evolution of molecules lead to organismal adaptation?

These are some of the questions being investigated in the LODGE.

In its most basic form, evolution is change in the frequency and structure of genes. Different evolutionary processes often leave characteristic patterns in the DNA sequences of populations, species, and higher taxa. The primary focus of research in the lab is to use these patterns of genetic/genomic variation to understand the processes that have given rise to organismal diversity. Phylogenetic patterns provide a road map for understanding organismal adaptations and the evolution of genomes. In a complementary sense, we are interested in how our understanding of evolutionary history can be improved with a better understanding of how genomes and molecular systems evolve.

A major current project in the lab is the Fish Tree of Life where we are investigating the phylogeny of all fishes.

--Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Th. Dobzhansky.--