From Plant Press Vol. 15, No. 3 from 2012
By David Erickson
On April 20-21, the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian Institution convened the 10th Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, hosted by the Department of Botany in collaboration with the United States Botanic Garden. This year’s symposium, titled “Transforming 21st Century Comparative Biology using Evolutionary Trees,” examined the development and application of phylogenetic methods in light of the massive advances in sequencing and genomic technology. Warren Wagner opened the symposium welcoming speakers and guests and provided an introduction into the Department of Botany and background on symposium subjects in the past. Wagner acknowledged the critical and ever-growing importance that phylogenies play in modern biology.
Wagner was followed by Jonathan Coddington who introduced the scope of investigation at the Smithsonian Institution to the many guests and speakers. He covered tremendous territory highlighting the diversity of research at the Institution with special emphasis on Institution wide projects. These projects include the Global Genome Initiative (GGI) which seeks to collect and curate one representative of all living genera, the Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatories (SIGEO) which is a global network of long-term, large-scale forest research plots and an international group of scientists dedicated to the study of tropical and temperate forest function and diversity, and its marine counterpart Marine Geo which seeks to quantify marine diversity through a network of marine research stations.
Following Coddington’s whirlwind tour of the diversity of research at the institution, Lawrence Dorr then introduced the winner of the 10th José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany. This year’s winner was Walter S. Judd, a Professor of Botany at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Judd is one of the world’s experts in the Ericaceae, has a strong interest in the Melastomataceae, and has been one of the principals in the “Generic Flora of the Southeastern United States” project. Judd was pleased and honored to accept the award and spoke about his many enjoyable times climbing the mountains of the West Indies.
Kenneth Wurdack then convened the symposium introducing the desire by the organizing committee to showcase how phylogenetic methods have changed, and also how the increasingly powerful phylogenies are being applied to answer hypothesis driven questions. First in the list of speakers was Scott Edwards from Harvard University. Edwards effectively threw down the gauntlet asserting that the traditional methods for analyzing data to infer phylogenies was inadequate to answer the most challenging of questions. Edwards forcefully advocated methods that employ coalescent approaches to investigating multigene phylogenies, particularly as the volume of data vastly expands in the genomic era. This is in contrast to methods that take a “total data” approach and hope the correct phylogenetic signal is contained within as a kind of average among the data. Edwards presentation served as the perfect introduction to get the audience thinking about how we build phylogenies and how thinking carefully about data analysis remains a critical question as we may be tempted to assume that genome scale data will intrinsically solve all phylogenetic questions.
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