Publications by authors named "K M Kjer"

Article Synopsis
  • Hymenoptera, which includes sawflies, wasps, ants, and bees, is a highly diverse group of insects with over 153,000 known species and potentially many more, playing crucial roles in ecosystems and economies as predators, parasitoids, and pollinators.
  • A study analyzing thousands of protein-coding genes in various insect species traced the evolutionary history of Hymenoptera, revealing that they began diversifying roughly 281 million years ago and identifying key lineages, including parasitoid wasps and the ancestral roots of bees.
  • The research suggests that the diversity of sawflies arose from a significant evolutionary shift among phytophagous Hymenoptera, and all parasitoid wasps are linked to a
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The size of molecular datasets has been growing exponentially since the mid 1980s, and new technologies have now dramatically increased the slope of this increase. New datasets include genomes, transcriptomes, and hybrid capture data, producing hundreds or thousands of loci. With these datasets, we are approaching a consensus on the higher level insect phylogeny.

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The phylogeny of insects has been both extensively studied and vigorously debated for over a century. A relatively accurate deep phylogeny had been produced by 1904. It was not substantially improved in topology until recently when phylogenomics settled many long-standing controversies.

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DNA barcoding was intended as a means to provide species-level identifications through associating DNA sequences from unknown specimens to those from curated reference specimens. Although barcodes were not designed for phylogenetics, they can be beneficial to the completion of the Tree of Life. The barcode database for Trichoptera is relatively comprehensive, with data from every family, approximately two-thirds of the genera, and one-third of the described species.

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