Causes and Consequences of Inclusive Inheritance

Session

Session 6

Nov 8, 2019, 9:00 AM

Lecture Hall (MPI for Evolutionary Biology)

27. Keynote: The many roles of parental effects in evolutionary biology

Tobias Uller

11/8/19, 9:00 AM

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...

28. Causes and consequences of seasonal transgenerational plasticity in a precocial rodent

Anja Günther

11/8/19, 9:30 AM

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...

29. Transgenerational plasticity and bet-hedging: a framework and a meta-analysis on insect diapause reaction norms

Jens Joschinski

11/8/19, 9:45 AM

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...

30. Epigenetic gene silencing alters the mechanisms and rate of evolutionary adaptation

Dragan Stajic

11/8/19, 10:00 AM

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...

31. Keynote: Plant epigenomics: from complex traits to molecular clocks

Frank Johannes

11/8/19, 10:45 AM

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...

32. General discussion of evolutionary underpinnings and consequences

11/8/19, 11:15 AM

33. Closing remarks

11/8/19, 12:15 PM