Biodiversité et écosystèmes (2022-2023) - Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo Collège de France

Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo
Biodiversité et écosystèmes (2022-2023)
Collège de France

Colloque - Integrating Evolutionary Genetics and Ecology : The Genetics of Super-Organismal Adaptation

Yannick Wurm, London, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo
Biodiversité et écosystèmes (2022-2023)
Collège de France

Colloque - Integrating Evolutionary Genetics and Ecology : An Ancestral Balanced Inversion Polymorphism Confers Global Adaptation

Since the pioneering work of Dobzhansky in the 1940s, many chromosomal inversions have been identified but how they contribute to adaptation remains poorly understood. In Drosophila melanogaster, the widespread inversion polymorphism In(3R)P is involved in climate adaptation, exhibiting non-neutral latitudinal clines on multiple continents. Here, I summarize new results suggesting that this chromosomal rearrangement represents a long-term (equilibrium) balanced polymorphism of ancestral African origin and that it harbors alleles that are maintained by balancing selection on several continents. Our findings indicate that In(3R)P spread out of its ancestral subtropical/tropical range and then become latitudinally along similar but independent climatic gradients, always being frequent in subtropical/tropical areas but rare or absent in temperate climates.

Thomas Flatt is Full Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Head of the Department of Biology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Thomas' research interests are the genomic basis of adaptation, population genetics, and the evolution life histories and aging, mainly using Drosophila as a model system. He received his M.Sc. from the University of Basel in 1999 (supervisor: Prof. Stephen Stearns), for work done at the University of Sydney with Prof. Richard Shine, and his Ph.D. from Fribourg in 2004 (supervisor: Prof. Tadeusz Kawecki). Between 2004 and 2008, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University with Prof. Marc Tatar and a visiting postdoc with Prof. Neal Silverman at UMass Medical School, funded by fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Roche Research Foundation. Prior to taking up his position in Fribourg in 2017, he was a SNSF Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Lausanne (2012-17), a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (2012), a faculty member of the Vienna Graduate School of Population Genetics and a tenured group leader at the Institute of Population Genetics in Vienna (2009-12). Between 2018 and 2021 he held a DFG Mercator Fellowship and Visiting Professorship at the University of Münster. He has been serving on numerous editorial, advisory and reviewing panels and, with Josefa Gonzalez (Barcelona), co-leads an international consortium of researchers, the European Drosophila Population Genomics Consortium (DrosEU). He currently serves as an elected member of the National Research Council, the scientific body of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo
Biodiversité et écosystèmes (2022-2023)
Collège de France

Colloque - Integrating Evolutionary Genetics and Ecology : How Do Genomic Architecture and Ecological Processes Interplay during Evolution? The Example of Chromosomal Inversions in Seaweed Flies

Claire Mérot, université de Rennes, Rennes, France

Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo
Biodiversité et écosystèmes (2022-2023)
Collège de France

Colloque - Integrating Evolutionary Genetics and Ecology : Rapidly Fluctuating Selection on Sub-Single Generation Time Scales in Drosophila

Dmitri Petrov, Stanford University, Stanford, USA

Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo
Biodiversité et écosystèmes (2022-2023)
Collège de France

Colloque - Integrating Evolutionary Genetics and Ecology : Eco-Evolutionary Processes Involved in Diversification in Sympatry

Violaine Llaurens, Muséum national

Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo
Biodiversité et écosystèmes (2022-2023)
Collège de France

Colloque - Integrating Evolutionary Genetics and Ecology : The Genomic Basis of a Repeatedly Evolving Sexually-Selected Syndrome in Mediterranean Wall Lizards

Traits can only function together if expressed together, but the evolution of such phenotypic integration remains poorly understood. In this talk, I will present our recent work on the evolutionary origin and geographic spread of a sexually selected syndrome in wall lizards. Climatic effects on the strength of sexual selection causes a mosaic of phenotypic variation across the landscape, and promotes asymmetric introgression into a distantly related lineage. The phenotypic integration of color, morphology, and behavior persists throughout a hybrid zone, pointing towards a genetic architecture with a single or few major loci. Analyses of genomic data supports this hypothesis and reveals a single candidate region with striking structural variations. I discuss how this genomic architecture can orchestrate the expression of color, morphology, and behavior, and what it can teach us about the evolution of complex phenotypes.

Nathalie Feiner is currently a researcher at Lund University, Sweden. After completing her PhD on comparative vertebrate genomics at the University of Konstanz, Germany, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, UK, as a Humboldt fellow and at Lund University as a Wennergren fellow. Since 2021, Nathalie Feiner is a group leader at Lund University and pursues research at the intersection of developmental biology, phenomics, genomics and ecology. A major them in her research is the question of how developmental processes shape evolutionary outcomes, and why evolution tends to repeat itself.