[The Svedberg seminar] – On giant lungfish genomes and the genomics of adaptations and speciation in hyperdiverse cichlid fish radiations
February 10, 2025 @ 15:15 – 16:15 CET
Axel Meyer
Professor
University of Konstanz, Germany
Bio
Axel Meyer (*1960 in Lübeck) studied biology at the Universities of Marburg and Kiel in Germany before he moved to the USA in 1982. At the University of California he received his Master (1985) and PhD (1988) degrees in Berkeley’s Department of Zoology. For the last year of his PhD he worked in the Biochemistry Department in lab of Allan C. Wilson at Berkeley. There he was part of a team that was the first to use PCR for questions in molecular evolution, phylogenetics, and ancient DNA. As an Alfred P. Sloan Postdoc he continued to work with Allan Wilson in the Biochemistry Department at Berkeley until 1990 when he became an Assistant and then (since 1993) Associate Professor in the Ecology and Evolution Department at Stony Brook, NY. In 1997 he returned to Germany as Chair in Zoology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Konstanz. He is a member of several academies, including EMBO, the Academia Europaea, the Berlin Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy Leopoldina, and The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received a numerous awards and fellowships including Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Carus Medal of the Leopoldina, and a Hector Prize. Axel Meyer’s research focuses on fundamental questions in evolutionary biology and comparative genomics with a focus on speciation, Hox genes, genomics of adaptations, and gene and genome duplications. He was among the first to confirm Susumo Ohno’s suggestion that all modern fishes are derived from a lineage that experienced an additional (the teleost-specific genome duplication, TSGD) genome duplication. Meyer received the EMBO award for communications in the life sciences for his efforts to communicate science to the public. He has a science podcast for Cicero Magazin, wrote a popular science book on the biology of men and women, and had a weekly column for the financial newspaper Handelsblatt. Besides Konstanz he is affiliated with the SCSIO in Guangzhou and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University
On giant lungfish genomes and the genomics of adaptations and speciation in hyperdiverse cichlid fish radiations
Lungfishes are the closest living relatives to tetrapods among the “fishes”. Their genomes are the largest animal genomes, composed of over 90% repetitive DNA, and their size, 3-15x larger than the human genome (~45-92Gb), makes them difficult to assemble and interpret. The analyses of these genomes revealed the genetics of some pre-adaptations (respiration, locomotion, nitrogen excretion, olfaction) that might have permitted their relatives to conquer land in the Devonian and to give rise to all land vertebrates. While lungfishes are ancient “living fossils” that appear not have changed for >100 Million years, the cichlid fishes of the East African Great lakes and of Nicaragua’s crater lakes have speciated and morphologically diversified at record speeds. New species formed within a few hundred generations and several phenotypic innovations evolved repeatedly and due to structural variants and transposable element activity.
Host: Dan Larhammar dan.larhammar@uu.se, Per Ahlberg Per.Ahlberg@ebc.uu.se, UU
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