With Martin Feder (Univ. Chicago), Tom Mitchell-Olds (Max Planck Inst. Chemical Ecology, Jena), Mark Aarts (Wageningen Univ.), Volker Loeschke (Univ. Aarhus), Joel Parker (Univ. Lausanne), Andrew Spiers (Univ. Oxford UK), Wilfried Wackernagel (Univ. Oldenburg).
The increasing impact of humans on the environment has urged the need to understand and predict how individual organisms, communities and ecosystems respond and adapt to environmental change. The novel interdisciplinary field of Ecological and Evolutionary Genomics (EEG) has opened up fascinating new ways to study short-term adaptation and long-term evolutionary changes of organisms in response to their environment. EEG studies functional significance of genomic variation in plants, animals and micro-organisms in natural communities. It enables scientists to address questions about the genetic basis of functional variation in the perception, signaling and responses to abiotic stresses, natural enemies and other environmental challenges, how this variation is shaped and how it constrains or facilitates responses.
First aim of this Current Themes in Ecology symposium is to give a state-of-the-art overview of EEG by prominent researchers working on plants, animals and micro-organisms, four years after the first Current Themes was devoted Environmental Genomics.
Second aim is to discuss the opportunities and limitations of EEG in 'non-model' organisms. Studies of sequenced model organisms such as Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster and Arabidopsis thaliana can use powerful genomic tools, but these organisms are not necessarily representatives of species involved in important ecological interactions and key ecosystem functions. A number of EEG researchers therefore work on model species chosen primarily on ecological grounds, that may be closely related, but also totally unrelated to sequenced model organisms. Many of us are facing such decisions when starting to work in the field of EEG. Speakers in this Current Themes of Ecology Symposium represent pairs of researchers working on sequenced and non-sequenced model organisms and in their presentations they will share their experience with respect to the issues described here.
Current Themes in Ecology is a symposium series organized by:
Wageningen University
University of Nijmegen
Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW)
Sponsored by:
Necov, Graduate schools PE&RC, FE, WIMEK/SENSE, and NWO
For the complete programme and registration please refer to the website.