Paul De Ley Assistant Professor and Assistant Nematologist University Office Building 117 909-787-2280 (x82280) email: pdeley@citrus.ucr.edu

Research areas

My long-term research interests are the ecology, phylogeny and taxonomy of nematodes, with particular emphasis on the behavioral, molecular and morphological differences between closely related species. Nematodes are often extremely diverse in seemingly uniform soils or sediments, and therefore provide a good "make it or break it" system for evaluating the ecological importance of biodiversity. However, this requires molecular and morphological techniques for accurately identifying species, for mapping their distribution, and for analysing their phylogenetic relationships. I am therefore focusing on the development of video microscopy methods combined with DNA amplification of individual nematodes. We are currently testing these methods in projects with a wide range of ecological and taxonomic settings, allowing us to test the robustness of our methods, and to compile video and DNA sequence databases of a wide range of nematode species.