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How Current Genomes are Shaped by Evolutionary Pasts
April 8, 2019, 7:00 PM
Free
Lives of organisms are shaped by their social interactions, including those with other individuals of the same species, as well as with individuals of different species. These interactions affect how our genomes evolve so that current patterns of DNA sequence variation from genomes can be used to detect past evolutionary events. Using the social amoeba and its microbial symbiont as an example, Suegene Noh, assistant professor of biology, will show how competitive interactions among amoebas has caused certain genes to evolve more rapidly, and how associating with an amoeba host may have caused symbiont genomes to shrink in size. Noh is an evolutionary biologist whose research focuses on understanding how social interactions among microbial organisms shape their genomes.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.