Friday February 7th 12:30h. Conference Hall, 3rd floor, IBMCP
Dr. Kirsten Bomblies
ETH Zürich, Switzerland
“ Learning to tango with four – adaptation to whole genome duplication“
Abstract
A large slice of evolution may be hidden to us, involving adaptations to cellular challenges that are not obvious to the human viewer but are important for survival. A unique system for studying such challenges is polyploidy, which results from a dramatic mutation – whole genome duplication. Genome duplication doubles the number of chromosomes, which is generally coupled with increased cell size, and these changes have knock-on effects on the physiology of organisms. Some can play out as beneficial, for example driving the stress tolerance polyploids are famous for, while others are challenges that necessitate evolutionary adjustment. We use Arabidopsis arenosa, which occurs naturally in both a diploid and an autotetraploid form, and where we can also make neo-autotetraploids from diploids in the lab. This system allows us to study both the challenges that arise, as well as the solutions that evolved in nature. Relying on genome scans for selection we did on the natural tetraploid, we have been following up candidate genes as well as discovering novel challenges employing both “forward” and “reverse” adaptation genomics. I will discuss two set of stories that highlight these two approaches and will discuss what we have learned about how cellular processes can evolve to compensate for whole-sale organismic changes.
Short Bio
Kirsten is currently a full professor at ETH Zürich, since 2019, leading the Plant Evolutionary Genetics group in the Institute of Molecular Plant Biology in the department of Biology. She obtained her bachelor’s at the University of Pennsylvania in Biochemistry in 1996 and then worked as a lab manager for Detlef Weigel at the Salk Institute in La Jolla California for three years before doing her PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from 1999-2004. She worked with John Doebley, studying the evolutionary genetics of maize domestication. From 2004-2009 she was a postdoc with Detlef Weigel at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, studying autoimmunity in plants. In 2008 she won a MacArthur Fellowship, an award given for “exceptional creativity” from the MacArthur Foundation in the US. In 2009 she started her independent career as an assistant professor, and later Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she initiated her work on polyploidy and established Arabidopsis arenosa as a new molecular model for the study of genome duplication. She moved briefly to the John Innes Center in the UK (in 2015), where she received an ERC Consolidator grant to fund her work on the evolution of polyploid meiosis, before moving on to ETH in early 2019, where she has been continuing this work, as well as additional work on evolutionary cell biology.
If anyone is interested in meeting with the speaker, please contact Aureliano Bombarely
