Next SOL Seminar Online will be presented by Gustavo Silva on Wild tomato ecological genomics. Elucidating adaptation process to stressful environments
Abstract. The study of mechanisms that allow species to adapt to their local environment is a long-standing question that remains a central topic in evolutionary biology. Currently, the disentangling of genetic mechanisms involved in adaptation processes related to rapid environmental change is receiving special attention. This knowledge has enormous applications in face of global warming such as crop breeding and biodiversity conservation. The wild tomato lineage provides an excellent example of recent diversification process related to wide differences in environmental conditions and strong periodic climatic oscillations such as El Niño phenomenon. Within this group, the species Solanum chilense has received special attention because occurs in broad environmental gradients such as coastal and highland hyper-arid environments around the Atacama Desert. Moreover, this species shows key features like high heterozygous genome and auto-incompatible reproductive system which makes it an ideal system to extend current analytical models to study adaptation. Here, I will present an overview of the studies implemented in S. chilense addressing adaptation to biotic and abiotic stress and show new insights arisen from the integration of niche modelling, historical demographic inference and genome scan approaches. The likely origin area of S. chilense is a mesic lowland region around south Peru and north Chile, diverging from marginal populations of S. peruvianum. Further southern expansion process occurred by two independent events following coastal and highland routes with about an order of magnitude of time difference. That time difference can be related to the contrasting characteristics between the available habitats on the coast and the highland and the source of local adaptive variants from either standing variation or newly emerged mutations.
When? Friday 9th October 4 pm (GMT+1)
The zoom link to join the meeting is https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/94333146166 Meeting ID: 943 3314 6166, password: Solanaceae
Watch this talk here: https://youtu.be/EvuDoZp9JpQ
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