6–8 Nov 2019
MPI for Evolutionary Biology
Europe/Berlin timezone

Contribution List

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  1. Miriam Liedvogel, Britta Meyer, Melanie Heckwolf, Sandra Bouwhuis
    06/11/2019, 13:50
  2. Sandra Bouwhuis
    06/11/2019, 14:00

    Birds, in comparison to mammals, are relatively long lived for their size and were once thought to largely escape senescence. As longitudinal studies have accumulated, it has, however, become clear that many avian traits show signs of late-life deterioration. In addition, there is increasing evidence for transgenerational effects of parental age. Using individual-based data from a large colony...

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  3. Yifan Pei
    06/11/2019, 14:30

    Using >2000 captive zebra finches that we have detailed information on early developmental stress experienced by these birds as well as their parents and grandparents, we quantify direct as well as trans-generational effects of early stress on multiple morphological and fitness-related traits. We meta-summarize the effects across multiple stressors and dependent traits in order to generate...

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  4. Alexandra Weyrich
    06/11/2019, 14:45

    Epigenetic changes function as flexible mechanisms increasing adaptability within a generation and transmitting the environmental information to subsequent generations in vertebrates. In times of global warming and changing vegetation, we aimed to study the epigenetic response of a wild mammal species, the wild guinea pig, to an increase in temperature (of 10°C more than ambient) as well as to...

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  5. Esther Langen
    06/11/2019, 15:00

    The social environment can affect the phenotype of breeding females and can have transgenerational effects on the phenotypes of their future offspring. Using Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica), we studied maternal (P0) effects of the social environment on female offspring (F1) housed under matched and mismatched conditions with respect to group size (pairs of two vs. groups of four birds). The...

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  6. div
    06/11/2019, 15:15

    see attachments, 8 posters, 3 min resp.

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  7. Alexei Maklakov
    07/11/2019, 09:00
  8. Celia Schunter
    07/11/2019, 09:30

    The impacts of climate change on marine organisms will depend on their ability to tolerate, acclimate and eventually adapt to the environmental change. We performed unique transgenerational experiments to determine the molecular response of a coral reef fish to ocean acidification. Our complex design allows us to: 1) investigate the importance of parental exposure to ocean acidification...

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  9. Jennifer Donelson
    07/11/2019, 09:45

    For a number of years we have been using a coral reef damselfish, Acanthochomis polyacanthus, to investigate the influence of thermal conditions experienced over multiple generations on performance. As the project’s focus was to understand transgenerational effects as a means for marine fish to acclimate and adapt to rapid environmental change, two future projected increases of +1.5°C and +3°C...

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  10. Kris Sales
    07/11/2019, 10:00

    Extreme weather events like heatwaves, commonly defined as periods of five successive days where thermal maximums are 5oC greater than the long-term average, are predicted to be one of the most probable and hazardous challenges we face in a warming world. While natural populations have been showing climate related stress responses and extinctions for decades, the proximate mechanisms behind...

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  11. 07/11/2019, 10:15
  12. Eric Miska
    07/11/2019, 11:45

    Since August Weismann (1834-1914) formulated the distinction between innate and acquired characteristics at the end of the 19th century, the debate relating to the inheritance of acquired traits has raised many controversies in the scientific community. Following convincing arguments against (e.g. William Bateson) this debate was then set aside by the majority of the scientific community....

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  13. Irene Adrian-Kalchhauser
    07/11/2019, 12:15

    Non-genetic inheritance (NGI) deals with inheritance mechanisms apart from DNA. Candidates for germ-cell mediated information transfer between generations are modified histones, DNA methylation, and small RNAs. These mechanisms are evolutionarily conserved. In addition, the heritability of environmental information in plants and animals has been demonstrated. Together, this has inspired a...

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  14. Peter Pruisscher
    07/11/2019, 12:30

    In insects, increasing evidence shows that epigenetic changes can be passed on to future generations. This is also true for diapause, an environmentally induced state of ‘hibernation’ that is characterised by arrested development and suppressed metabolism. In Lepidoptera there is a strong paternal influence on the diapause decision of the offspring. However, not much is known about the...

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  15. Alexandre Fellous
    07/11/2019, 12:45

    Our climate is changing rapidly and organisms must either move, adapt or acclimate in order to persist. Epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation may be an important mechanism underlying fast, adaptive responses, as they can contribute to heritable changes within populations and drive rapid evolution. Crucial during gametogenesis and development (embryogenesis), epigenetic modifications...

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  16. Pat Monaghan
    07/11/2019, 14:00

    It is now well recognised that the early environment is not simply permissive of development, but can also shape the phenotype in ways that have long term consequences for performance and fitness. There are many routes, both direct and indirect, whereby such environmental effects on phenotypic development can come about and span generations. Of considerable importance in this context is...

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  17. Peter Korsten
    07/11/2019, 14:30

    It is well-established that the yolk of eggs of birds contains androgens like testosterone. These maternally derived hormones have been found to influence the behaviour and growth of the chicks hatching from these eggs. Hence, maternal yolk hormones have been hypothesized to act as adaptive maternal effects shaping the offspring’s phenotype, particularly in relation to the rearing environment....

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  18. Laura Baldassarre
    07/11/2019, 14:45

    The phenotype of an animal cannot be explained entirely by its genes. Among the factors, other than genome, which contribute to the development and homeostasis of multicellular animals, the microbial associated community can be rapidly modified by environmental cues and may represent a mechanism for rapid acclimation and adaptation of the host to a changing environment. The Starlet Sea...

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  19. Olivia Roth
    07/11/2019, 15:30

    Phenotypic changes in response to environmental influences can be transferred from one generation to the next with the potential to boosting offspring performance. This also applies to parental parasitic experience that can influence offspring immune responses, a phenomenon known as transgenerational immune priming (TGIP), which is often coupled with a vertical transfer of microbes. While in...

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  20. 07/11/2019, 16:00
  21. Bram Kuijper
    07/11/2019, 16:30
  22. Martin Lind
    07/11/2019, 17:00

    Environments vary over time and if this variation is predictable, environments that are similar across generations should favour evolution of anticipatory parental effects to benefit offspring. In contrast, the absence of correlation between parental and offspring environments should select against parental effects. However, experimental evidence is scarce. We investigated the evolution of...

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  23. Konstantinos Sagonas
    07/11/2019, 17:15

    The capacity of different species to respond to a given selective environment often varies. While nucleotide diversity has long been recognised as the sole predictor of species and populations potential to adapt, current evidence suggest that populations or species may compensate for low genetic diversity through plastic responses. A possible heritable non-genetic mechanism underlying...

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  24. Juan Lugo Ramos
    07/11/2019, 17:30

    Co-Authors: Gillian Durieux, Miriam Liedvogel
    Bird Migratory behaviour depend on adaptations optimized for flight, timing, navigation and fuel allocation. The heritability of these adaptations has been shown with classical approaches of crossbreeding experiments suggesting that the genetics of migration rely on few genes with large effects. However, studies with candidate genes and population...

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  25. Tobias Uller
    08/11/2019, 09:00

    There is a bewildering diversity of perspectives on parental effects. My aim in this talk is to make sense of this diversity by drawing attention to the organising role of problem agendas in evolutionary biology. I discuss and exemplify how different evolutionary problems motivate different ways to represent the relationship between parents and offspring. These representations in turn...

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  26. Anja Günther
    08/11/2019, 09:30

    When environments are unstable, genetic parental information is often not sufficient for offspring to become optimally adapted to the environment and parental effects may be necessary to prepare offspring for the environment they are likely to experience. Seasonally distinct life history patterns over sequential cohorts in short-lived animals are one example in which cues of the early...

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  27. Jens Joschinski
    08/11/2019, 09:45

    In light of recent climate change phenotypic plasticity has received ample attention. Not only can plasticity evolve, it can also affect evolution by tinkering with the raw material for selection (phenotypes). Bet-hedging, however, is rarely considered in this context, despite being tightly linked to trans-generational plasticity. We argue that the neglect of bet-hedging is due to synonymizing...

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  28. Dragan Stajic
    08/11/2019, 10:00

    Natural selection acts upon heritable variation in fitness-related traits. In principle, epigenetic, non-DNA sequence based inheritance can potentially contribute to adaptation. Whether this is the case is largely unknown. To address this, we placed a URA3 reporter gene at different positions within subtelomeric, chromatin-silenced regions in the otherwise isogenic Sacharomyces cerevisiae...

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  29. Frank Johannes
    08/11/2019, 10:45

    Epigenetic modifications, including DNA methylation, have a major role in gene regulation and in the preservation of genome integrity. In plants, aberrant gains or losses of DNA methylation (i.e. ‘epimutations’) are sometimes stably inherited to subsequent generations, independently of DNA sequence changes. Here I highlight our ongoing efforts to quantify the stability and phenotypic impact of...

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  30. 08/11/2019, 11:15
  31. 08/11/2019, 12:15
  32. Rachel Spinks

    Rising sea temperature poses a significant threat to marine fishes. While current-day populations of reef fish suffer when exposed short-term to elevated temperatures, future warming will occur over numerous generations for most species. Recent studies have shown that when parents experience warmer ocean conditions throughout life, offspring performance improves. Yet we do not know the...

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