Marck

My research interests focus on identifying and organizing the phylogenetic components of biological diversity in ways that reflect evolutionary knowledge and facilitate further systematic study.

Currently I'm working to generate a phylogeny of the genus Aethionema in the family, Brassicaceae (the mustard family) and to use the phylogeny to begin answering questions regarding trait evolution and biogeography for the group.

Aethionema is a genus of approximately 65 species of perennial and annual plants native to open, semiarid terrain in southwestern Asia, southern Europe and northern Africa. The genus has never been monographed and many taxonomic issues are still not resolved. However, the results of broad-scale molecular phylogenies for the family Brassicaceae have shown that Aethionema is the sister group to the rest of Brassicaceae. This finding was never suspected prior to the use of molecular data, as the morphology of Aethionema is not especially disparate, relative to other genera in Brassicaceae. Now, with Aethionema known to be one half of the basal extant divergence in its family, understanding the evolution of this understudied genus is a crucial step towards understanding the evolutionary origins of the entire Brassicaceae.

The construction and analysis of multiple data sets of homologous DNA sequence data is currently underway, with regions from the chloroplast genome proving to be particularly productive. In addition, the collection, determination and morphological analysis of Aethionema specimens is also an exciting and involved undertaking for both understanding previous taxonomic concepts and morphological diferentiation with the genus.

http://www.biology.wustl.edu/faculty/schaal/MenkeWebPage/menke.html