Plenary Talk Title
Ancient gene linkages and ultraconserved elements disentangle recalcitrant branches in Arachnida
Biography
Siddharth Kulkarni is a Ramanujan Faculty at the CSIR-Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad. He earned his Ph.D. from George Washington University and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before returning to India to establish his research group.
His laboratory investigates the origin and maintenance of biodiversity, specifically focusing on the asymmetric diversity of lineages within the arthropod group Chelicerata. His notable contributions include developing spider-specific probes for phylogenomics and reconstructing the first global phylogenies for Amblypygi (whip spiders) and Solifugae (camel spiders).
During this plenary session, Dr. Kulkarni will focus on deep evolutionary relationships within Chelicerata through chromosome-level genomic analyses, utilizing synteny and whole-genome duplication as key phylogenetic characters.