Molecular Systematics of Parasitoid Hymenoptera:

Phylogeny of microgastrine braconid genera and related subfamilies.   Funded originally by the USDA NRI Program and supplemented by several NSF – funded projects, this work has lead to several published analyses (Mardulyn and Whitfield, 1999; Whitfield et al., 2002) using 3 genes and morphology, and more recently we have added additional nuclear genes (7 genes – Banks, and Whitfield, 2006) and are now expanding the survey to 10 genes and approximately 250 taxa.  The microgastrine genera appear to have originated in a burst of diversification about 50 mya, thus making the relationships difficult to estimate, especially with limited data.  Our lab is collaborating with that of Andy Austin at the University of Adelaide on this research. 

Discrimination of cryptic species of reared microgastrine wasps using DNA barcodes.  A collaborative project with Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs (University of Pennsylvania and the Guanacaste Conservation Area -ACG, Costa Rica) and the laboratory of Paul Hebert (University of Guelph), now resulting in the discrimination of an unexpected number of biologically and genetically distinct but morphologically virtually indistinguishable similar species.  The work links classical taxonomic work from our laboratory with host data from the Janzen-Hallwachs long-term rearing project at ACG and DNA barcoding at Guelph to infer species diversity and host-specificity in an assemblage of over 200 species.  We also have helped develop a method for obtaining usable DNA barcodes from older specimens including those from museums, so that the new barcodes can be more effectively linked with historically important specimens such as paratype series, etc. (Hajibabaei et al., 2006).