Evolution in Sweden 2025

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Comparisons of the genomes of contemporary domestic animals and plants with those of their wild relatives, have provided a wealth of insights into not only when and where our ancestors started the process, but also what specific genetic variants are key to modern phenotypes. Furthermore, once coupled to palaeogenomic data, such datasets can also even reveal the order in which such variants arose, shedding further insights into the process itself. However, while there is no doubt that we have learnt much about domestication in general, and indeed for most domestic species we can clearly document the genetic basis of why the end product differs from the start, I argue that there may be certain processes that were involved that have been largely overlooked, in particular related to the so-called hologenome.

Biography:

Tom Gilbert is Professor of Palaeogenomics at the University of Copenhagen, Professor II at NTNU University Museum, and Director of the DNRF Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics. He holds a PhD in the study of ancient DNA from the University of Oxford, and has been active in both trying to develop methods to both expand the potential of ancient DNA to our understanding of the past, as well as more recently leading research aimed at revisiting our understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes using hologenomic techniques – ie the integrative approach of combining host genomes with those of their microbiome.

Netherlands Institute of Ecology/ Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Epigenetic mechanisms are those molecular mechanisms that affect gene expression without changing the DNA sequence. The value of epigenetic mechanisms is increasingly recognized, also in relation to questions in ecology and evolution. However, epigenetic research related to behavioural variation in the natural habitat is still in its infancy. The flexible nature of epigenetic marks opens the possibility that such changes are adaptive, while at the same time may simply be the consequence of environmental variation. Hence, changes in epigenetic marks can function as switches in order to help an organism develop, as signals of aging via accumulation of methylation over time, but they also may aid organisms to cope with changing circumstances throughout their lifetime. In this presentation, I use data of our great tit system to show examples of how tissue and cell-specific epigenetic patterns, mainly focusing on DNA methylation, may affect behavioral phenotypes such as exploratory behavior and reversal learning performance. I discuss what the role is of epigenetic mechanisms for behavioral adaptation to changing environments.

Biography:

Kees van Oers is an evolutionary behavioural ecologist. He currently holds a chair in Animal Personality at Wageningen University and is senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). His research focuses on explaining the causes and consequences of individual variation in animal behaviour, mainly cognitive and animal personality traits. He does this from an ecological and evolutionary point of view, at the crossroads between behavioural ecology and behaviour genetics. His goal is to find answers to fundamental and strategic questions related to individual responses to changing environments. This is relevant since the world and therefore the environment is constantly changing partly due to human influences affecting biodiversity at all functional levels.

Institute of Ecology and Evolution, School of Biology, The University of Edinburgh, UK

The rate of meiotic recombination often shows large differences between the sexes. It can be strongly female-biased (humans), strongly male-biased (macaques/sheep) or somewhere in between. Understanding why this happens is key to understanding the evolution of recombination rates, yet the causes and consequences of this phenomenon remain unknown. This talk will focus on our most recent work in house sparrows (Passer domesticus), with broader context from work in mammals and fish. We use genomic data in large pedigrees to characterise individual recombination rates and landscapes to: (a) investigate the heritability and genomic basis of variation in recombination rates; (b) identify genomic correlates with fine-scale sex-differences in recombination landscapes; and (c) use genomic prediction approaches to understand the relationship between recombination and fitness within each sex. Our work provides a foundation for broader understanding of the vast diversity of recombination rates in eukaryotic genomes.

Biography:

Susan Johnston is an evolutionary quantitative geneticist based at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where she is a Senior Lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow. Her research centres on using genomic information to understand selection and evolution in both wild and domesticated populations. At the moment, her group focusses on questions related to genomic signatures of sexual conflict, the maintenance of genetic variation in immunity, and the causes and consequence of recombination landscape variation. She does this by taking advantage of long-term ecological datasets and deep pedigrees with genomic data in mammals, birds and fish.