CAREER: Hybridization and radiation: Integrating across phylogenomics, ancestral niche evolution, and pollination biology

Hybridization—the flow of genetic information between species—is a major source of biodiversity, especially in plants. Hybridization is also involved in economically important processes such as the domestication of crop plants and the evolution of weedy species. Biologists have made substantial progress describing hybridization in many organisms and investigating its significance for evolutionary adaptation and the origin of new species. However, the reasons behind why some organisms hybridize often but others do not remain obscure. Understanding these reasons requires an appropriate research organism that has engaged in hybridization in different environments both in ancient and modern times. This study will use the flowering plant genus Heuchera, commonly known as alumroot or coral bells. Researchers will study the environmental context of hybridization in Heuchera across North America and through its recent geological history. The relationship between hybridizing species and their climatic environment will be assessed using genetic data for all species, ecological modeling, and volatile chemical profiling of plants and their pollinators. These data and models will be implemented into a teaching plan that introduces data science training into classes at Mississippi State University. Students will gain hands-on experience through course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). This project will benefit two established courses, and two new courses will be developed. Summer research experiences will further enable students to learn field, lab, and computational skills. Additionally, a workshop for high school teachers will result in development of data science curricula for high school students. The researchers will also outreach to the scientific community through a Data Wrangling workshop series aimed at early-career plant scientists. Finally, the researchers will launch a website focusing on publicly accessible scientific information for these economically important landscaping plants. The overall theory that this project seeks to test is that hybridization frequency is related to change through time both of organisms and of the environments they live in, both of which control the flow of genetic information. The data and models produced in this study will be used to test three specific hypotheses: hybridization frequency is environmentally driven by (1) the changing seasonal climates of today and (2) areas that experienced substantial past climate change, and biologically driven by (3) pollination by a broad variety of insects rather than a narrow target insect. This project is jointly funded by Systematics and Biodiversity Science, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and Evolutionary Processes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.