URI biologist Christopher Lane, associate professor of biological sciences, has been awarded a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study the genetics of three groups of parasites and single-celled organisms, work that will help scientists complete a detailed tree of life of earth’s living organisms.

The grant is part of NSF’s Genealogy of Life program, which is examining the evolutionary patterns and processes of life on earth.

“There are lots of areas of the tree of life that we know very little about,” said Lane, who joined the URI faculty in 2008 and studies marine biodiversity and comparative genomics. “We don’t know a lot about what’s at the base of the tree of life, for instance, and what major groups belong together.”

The three groups he is studying “are responsible for an enormous amount of ecosystem functioning that we don’t appreciate or fully recognize,” Lane added. “Many are having huge impacts on food webs, both marine and terrestrial, and we know very little about what they do and who they are.”