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Research and Professional Interests:

My research involves topics at the interfaces of plant evolution, ecology, biogeography, development, molecular genetics, systematics, and bioinformatics. Topics of my current research projects include the following:

Phylogenetics, biogeography, and ecological diversification of the subfamily Grevilleoideae, the largest (45 genera, ca. 950 spp.) and most widespread of the subfamilies in the southern hemisphere family Proteaceae. The group includes 3 of the 10 largest flowering plant genera in Australia (Grevillea, Hakea, Banksia s.l.), the plant group (Banksia s.l.) with the most extensive fossil record in Australia, and all 8 of the extant genera of Proteaceae in South America. My lab is working with colleagues to (1) construct a backbone phylogeny for the subfamily, (2) construct fine-scale phylogenies for 8 focal groups of outstanding biogeographical, ecological, and/or paleobotanical significance, (3) thoroughly revise the taxonomy of the subfamily to produce maximally predictive circumscriptions of genera, subtribes, and tribes, (4) test the effects of the break-up of Gondwana on the subfamily using the many replicate disjunctions (e.g., at least 6 between Australasia and South America), (5) test the effects of widespread aridification on ecological diversification in the Australian members, and (6) test the chronological co-occurrence of at least 6 replicate disjunctions between Australia's diverse Southwest Botanic Province and eastern coast - areas separated by Australia's central deserts.

Evolution of the heterostyly supergene in Primulaceae. Heterostyly is an interesting genetic polymorphism that produces two (or three) types of flowers in a population, each with the anthers and stigma in positions reciprocal to that found in the other type(s). This structural difference is accompanied by an incompatibility system that mostly limits successful crosses to those between the two (or three) types. Heterostyly is now known from 28 families of flowering plants. Charles Darwin first brought it to the attention of science with his 1877 publication on Primula vulgaris, and Alfred Ernst's 30 years of crossing experiments in the early 1900's made the genetics of heterostyly in Primula the best studied of any group. From Ernst's data, we know that three or more genes grouped together in the "heterostyly supergene" control the morphological and physiological components of heterostyly in the Primulaceae. Today, heterostyly in Primula vulgaris is again the subject of genetic study, this time with modern molecular tools. My lab is working with colleagues to add an evolutionary dimension to this work, focusing on the evolutionary assembly of the supergene and the subsequent loss of allelic variation in it (most notably in the monomorphic, buzz-pollinated genus Dodecatheon).

Design of new functionality for MorphBank, an open web repository for biological images. Many biological disciplines draw important conclusions from images. These disciplines include comparative morphology, anatomy, and histology, morphological phylogenetics, taxonomy, and paleobiology. However, many of these images cannot be published due to page constraints in journals, and thus they are not widely available. MorphBank is for these images what GenBank is for genetic data - an easily accessed storehouse with added functionality tailored to the disciplines using the resource. My lab is working with colleagues to design web applications for the annotation of these images. These applications will permit a user to associate fully searchable text with a subset of pixels in an image without corrupting the original image file. We are designing this technology with the remote curation of natural history collections in mind, though it will be widely useful to the biological sciences.

Modeling the spatial distribution of invasive plant species. Invasive plant species do tremendous ecological and economic damage in Florida. My lab is working to model the spatial distributions of the most aggressive invasive upland species in Florida using Genetic Algorithms for Rule-set Prediction and similar niche modeling approaches. This will help land managers to locate invasive populations and enable us to predict the future extent of those species currently expanding their distributions.

Selected Publications:

Mast, A. R. and K. Thiele. 2007. Transfer of Dryandra to Banksia. Australian Systematic Botany 20:63-71.

Mast, A. R., S. Kelso, and E. Conti. 2006. Are any primroses (Primula) primitively monomorphic? New Phytologist 171: 605-616.

Mast, A. R. and E. Conti. 2006. The primrose path to heterostyly. New Phytologist 171: 439-442.

Mast, A. R., E. H. Jones, and S. P. Havery. 2005. An assessment of old and new DNA sequence evidence for the paraphyly of Banksia with respect to Dryandra (Proteaceae). Australian Systematic Botany 18:75-88.

Mast, A. R., D. M. S. Feller, S. Kelso, and E. Conti. 2004. Buzz-pollinated Dodecatheon originated from within the heterostylous Primula subgenus Auriculastrum (Primulaceae): A 7-region cpDNA phylogeny and its implications for floral evolution. American Journal of Botany 91:926-942.

Berry, P. E., W. J. Hahn, K. J. Sytsma, J. C. Hall, and A. Mast. 2004. Phylogenetic relationships and biogeography of Fuchsia (Onagraceae) based on noncoding nuclear and chloroplast DNA data. American Journal of Botany 91:601-614.

Mast, A. R., and R. Nyffeler. 2003. Using a null model to recognize significant co-occurrence prior to identifying candidate areas of endemism. Systematic Biology 52:271-280.

Mast, A. R., and T. J. Givnish. 2002. Historical biogeography and the origin of stomatal distributions in Banksia and Dryandra (Proteaceae) based on their cpDNA phylogeny. American Journal of Botany 89:1311-1323.

Graduate Students:

Jones, Eric
Kubes, Amanda

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