Marina Herrera Sarrias: Studies of mutation dynamics in evolution
Time: Wed 2022-11-30 13.30
Location: Albano, Cramer room
Participating: Marina Herrera Sarrias
Abstract
Plant-insect interaction is a rapidly growing area of research with roots in evolutionary biology and phylogenetics. Studies in this field seek to provide new insights into how plant-insect interactions are shaped and mediated, in a molecular context or within the framework of an ecosystem. Coevolution is also a dynamic of great interest in the field, since the interaction between species is likely to shape their own evolutionary trajectory. At the genomic level, duplications create novel genes and provide a source for evolutionary innovation. Since novel traits are known to be built-up over evolutionary time, it is reasonable to suspect that mutational dynamics can be found not only across species, but also among individuals within a population, and either on a large or small-scale. In this talk I will present the prototype of a tool for conducting genome-wide studies of small-scale structural mutations, in particular, tandem exon duplicates. The latter motivated by the fact that genes composed by tandem exon duplicates can yield to a more functionally diverse protein repertoire.