Evolutionary genomics of plant adaptation and speciation
Plant Evolutionary Genomics
Understanding the genetics of adaptation, reproductive isolation and speciation has always been of great interest to biology, but the molecular and computational tools required to address these long-standing questions have become available only recently. The advent of genomic and post-genomic science holds great promise for students of organismal evolution in both animals and plants. We use plants as preferred organisms for our research, because plants are more amenable to evolutionary genetics studies, e.g. plants can often be crossed rather easily and their sessile nature facilitates the estimation of fitness effects (the ‘adaptive value’) of individual traits, chromosomal segments, or even individual genes in the wild. An important motivation for our work also lies in the immense potential conservation value of phenotypes and genotypes we study, especially in wild relatives of domesticated species. Our current flagship project (funded by the British NERC and the Swiss SNF) addresses the evolutionary genomics of adaptation and speciation in European Populus (poplars and aspens), please find out more about our interests at: http://www.unifr.ch/biol/ecology/lexer/research.html
Research topics
Genetics of plant speciation
Genetics of local adaptation
Plant species evolution in neotropical mountains
Interdisciplinary
Ecological & evolutionary functional genomics
Genetics of plant chemical traits (e.g. secondary compounds)
Genetics of traits involved in range shifts
Ecological impact and evolutionary outcomes of hybridization
Integrating molecular population genetics and biogeography
