10.3.2017
Genetic Society of Slovenia kindly invites you to attend the lecture: »Yeast population genomics: Origin and evolution of a classic model organism« by Dr. Gianni Liti (IRCAN, Nice, France).
The lecture will take place on Wednesday, the 15th March 2017, at 15:30 in the Lecture Hall B2 at the Department of Biology, Večna pot 111, 1000 Ljubljana.
Abstract of the lecture:
The baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has had a long association with human activity, leading to the idea that its use in fermentation lead to its domestication. However, recent studies revealed that S. cerevisiae has a rather ubiquitous distribution in the wild, not limited to human-associated environments, showing that its history goes far beyond its association with humans. In the past decade, we applied population-level sequencing to thousands of S. cerevisiae strains to further illuminate the population structure and the impact of human activity. Many breeds associated to specific human process (e.g. wine, sake, beer, bioethanol) have specific genomic signatures likely driven by adaptation to industrial environments. In parallel, we discovered many wild lineages and detected substantial genomic differences when compared with the human associated strains. Interestingly, genome analysis of highly diverged wild lineages that predate domestication is consistent with South East Asia as the geographic origin of S. cerevisiae. We further explore this natural variation by generating synthetic population derived by genetic crosses and pioneered these microbial outbred populations in experimental evolution analysis.