9701251 DESALLE Much of what scientists know about the genetics and molecular biology of living organisms has been learned from a single species of insect, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The genus Drosophila contains thousands of species. Continuing research on the biology of D. melanogaster will benefit from comparisons with other species, especially if the phylogenetic history of these species is known. Understanding the phylogenetic history of this large group of species is a complex task, as no single source of information (e.g. the sequence of a single gene obtained from all species) is powerful enough to answer all questions about the relationships among species. In this research, Rob DeSalle and doctoral candidate James Remson will reconstruct the phylogenetic history for the closest relatives of Drosophila melanogaster using a large amount of information, especially from the DNA sequences of several different genes. The study will concentrate on species that live in the Hawaiian Islands, where a large number of Drosophila species are found. A major question to be answered is whether the Hawaiian Drosophila species arose from one, or more than one, OfounderO species. The use of multiple sets of data should provide a more robust reconstruction of the phylogenetic history of Drosophila than has been available previously.
