» Dr. Mark E. Siddall
Dr. Mark E. Siddall
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Research in Mark's lab has considered phylogenetic relationships and comparative genomics of a wide array of taxonomic groups including annelids, crustaceans, platyhelminths, protists and bacteria. His team's current work on leeches, funded through a Revisionary Systematics Grant from the National Science Foundation, concerns the diversity and biogeographic history of the world's medicinal leeches. Recent field-work has included Rwanda, Mexico, Zambia, and Uruguay. Using leech phylogeny as a guide, Mark's group has characterized thousands of expressed sequence tags from salivary tissues of several species in order to understand the evolution of anticoagulation by these blood-feeding animals. Their research receives considerable media attention, including Arte, NPR's Little Known Planet and Science Friday as well as PBS's NOVA and Secret Life of Scientists
Investigations of leech-bacterial symbioses has involved expeditions to collect the Giant Amazonian leech and the notorious hippo leech that feeds exclusively from the rectal tissues of its host. The work established a new genus of alphaproteobacteria, and determined that there were three independent colonizations of bloodfeeding leeches by these symbiotic relationships: one from the nitrogen-fixing Rhizobeacea and two separately from the broadly endosymbiotic Enterobacteraciae. DNA sequence data, biochemical and antibiotic tests demonstrate that the gut flora of various leeches is dominated by a diversity of Aeromonas species and unculturable species of Bacteroidetes. On the theoretical side, Mark has developed several methods of evaluating the relative support for phylogenetic hypotheses including the taxon-jackknife, the Manhattan stratigraphic metric, phylogenetic covariance and, most recently, partition bootstrap support.
In addition to his research and curatorial responsibilities for Annelida, Mark is the Museum's Site Director for the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, now in its 3rd decade. He also serves as Treasurer for the Willi Hennig Society is Graphics Editor for the Journal of Parasitology, and maintains his own blog.
Mark received his PhD from the University of Toronto and was on faculty at the University of Michigan before coming to the museum in 1999.
Curatorial Responsibility: Annelida
Scientific Assistant: Sarfraz Lodhi (for Mollusca)
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