Welcome to the Western Australian Museum’s Molecular Systematics Unit Blog

MSU's blog | Created 1 decade ago

At the Western Australian Museum (WAM) we work hard to collect, describe and understand Western Australia’s rich natural heritage, and to understand its place in the world. In the collections facility based at Welshpool, we are amassing animal specimens from across the state, country and planet, from scorpions to cockatoos, and snails to whales. We collect these specimens so that we can answer basic questions about the natural world, such as:

1. How many different types of animal (species) are there?
2. How are they related to each other?
3. Where are they found in the wild?
4. Why are they found where they are?

The first two questions are the focus of the field of “Systematics”, while the third and fourth questions are the concern of “Biogeography”.

Typically, this endeavor involves painstaking work by taxonomists, who dedicate their lives to describing how one group of organisms look different to another group of organisms. Then, as specimens are collected from the field, they are identified and catalogued, building up a huge resource of specimen collections and associated data that helps us understand our natural world.

Recently, we have started to use molecular tools (e.g. sequencing DNA) to help us do this work. By comparing the DNA of multiple specimens we know how related they are, which helps us determine if two specimens belong to a single species, or to separate species. This is because certain fragments of DNA can be interpreted as a record of the evolutionary history of species. Closely related individuals of the same species will have almost identical DNA (e.g. sibling Carnaby’s Cockatoos from the same nest), closely related species will have most of their DNA in common (e.g. Baudin’s and Carnaby’s Cockatoos), while distantly related species will have much less of their DNA in common (e.g. cockatoos and emus).

Here at the Molecular Systematics Unit we extract DNA from tissue samples and carry out molecular analyses to reconstruct the evolutionary history of species. On this blog we will post about our research in the Molecular Systematics Unit; covering diverse topics such as laboratory methods, collecting specimens from the field, research findings, and comment on interesting findings from the world of molecular systematics.

We hope it will broaden your understanding of the type of work we do and inform you about some of the exciting science being carried out here at the WA Museum.