Naylor Laboratory Home Page

Associate Professor;
Ph.D., University of Maryland, 1989

Research and Professional Interests:

In the Naylor lab we are interested in the mechanisms underlying biological diversification at both the organismal level and the molecular level. We would like to know (as would many) how new traits arise and how genetic variation maps to phenotypic variation. Before we can find out, we need a road map to give us an indication of which kinds of organisms/molecules gave rise to which--an evolutionary tree of relationships. We use phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequence comparisons to estimate evolutionary relationships among different entities. We work with vertebrates. The lab is not restricted to any particular group, but a major project in the lab involves reconstructing the evolutionary tree for sharks and rays on the basis of DNA sequence comparisons. We have focused on sharks because (1) they exhibit a diverse range of traits (2) they have an excellent fossil record.

Selected Publications:

Naylor, G. J. P., and M. Gerstein. 2000. Measuring shifts in function and evolutionary opportunity using variability profiles: a case study of the globins. Journal of Molecular Evolution 51:223-233.

Adams, D. C., and G. J. P. Naylor. 2000. A comparison of methods for assessing the structural similarity of proteins. Mathematical Methods for Protein Structure Analysis and Design Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2666:109-115.

Naylor, G. J. P., and D. C. Adams. 2001. Are the fossil data really at odds with the molecular data? Morphological evidence for Cetartiodactyla phylogeny reexamined. Systematic Biology 50:444-453.

Naylor, G. J. P., and D. C. Adams. 2001. Are the fossil data really at odds with the molecular data? (vol 50, pg 444, 2001). Systematic Biology 50:1026-1026.

Savolainen, V., M. W. Chase, N. Salamin, D. E. Soltis, P. S. Soltis, A. J. Lopez, O. Fedrigo, and G. J. P. Naylor. 2002. Phylogeny reconstruction and functional constraints in organellar genomes: plastid atpB and rbcL sequences versus animal mitochondrion. Systematic Biology 51:638-647.

Schonfeld, J., O. Eulenstein, K.Vander Velden, and G. J. P. Naylor. 2002. Investigating evolutionary lines of least resistance using teh inverse protein-folding problem. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing.

Naylor, G. J. P., and D. C. Adams. 2003. Total evidence versus relevant evidence: a response to O'Leary et al. (2003). Systematic Biology 52:864-865.

Postdoctoral Associates:

Inoue, Jun

Graduate Students:

Aschliman, Neil C
Lakner, Clemens

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