无尾目两栖动物（蛙类）包含了55科、6600多种，是陆生脊椎动物中物种数量最多的类群之一。阐明蛙类动物不同分类单元间的系统发育关系，既是我们了解蛙类丰富生物多样性、合理利用资源的基础，也是指导相关生物学研究开展的关键基础知识。蛙类动物进化历程时间跨度大，要可靠解析蛙类主干生命树，需要分析大量的数据，然而目前相关研究分析基因的数量不超过12个，所得结果的可靠性也很低。针对这一问题，本项目拟利用我们近期开发的102个脊椎动物高通用性核基因标记，以蛙类科级分类单元为目标，通过系统发育基因组学分析构建高解析度的蛙类主干生命树，为蛙类科级分类单元间、以及部分主要的亚科分类单元间提供可靠的系统发育关系与分歧时间假说。并以此为基础，开展蛙类的生物地理学研究，研究蛙类各主要类群的早期起源地点与扩散方式，从生物地理的角度研究盘古大陆、劳亚大陆与冈德瓦纳大陆在中生代与新生代的分裂过程。

Living frogs (Amphibia: Anura) comprise over 6,600 recognized species, currently assigned into 55 families. They are one of the most diverse groups of living vertebrates. A robust, reliable phylogeny concerning the relationships among different anuran taxonomic units is not only the basic for our understanding to the huge biodiversity of frogs, but also is essential to address fundamental issues of morphological, developmental, and biogeographical evolution of these animals. The time span for frog evolution is big, which makes it difficult to address their deep evolutionary relationships. To reliably resolving the backbone phylogeny of frogs, analyzing a large number of genes is needed. However, the number of molecular markers that can be applied in anuran phylogenetics is currently small (not more than 12), consequently the resolution of the frog tree is poor. To address this problem, we plan to use the 102 vertebrate-universal nuclear markers recently developed by our lab, to construct a robust hypothesis on deep anuran phylogenetic relationships, as well as to estimate divergence times of the main anuran lineages by large-scale data analysis. In addition, we will perform a biogeographic analysis for frogs, based on the newly obtained phylogeny and divergence times, to study the breakup of Pangea, Laurasia, and Gondwana during the period of Mesozoic and Cenozoic.