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Seminars
October 23, 2024
12:00 pm Terasaki Life Science Building (TLSB), Room 1100 AND via zoom
Dr. Justin Meyer
UCSD
" Virus Speciation "
Recent discoveries have revealed that viruses form distinct genomic clusters, with gene exchange occurring predominantly within, rather than between, these clusters. This structure mirrors predictions made by the Biological Species Concept and raises the intriguing possibility that viruses undergo speciation processes similar to those observed in multicellular organisms. This finding is particularly exciting because viruses, as highly tractable systems, oer a valuable platform for experimentally testing speciation theory. Dr. Meyer will present results from bacteriophage evolution experiments that demonstrate the emergence of new species, alongside analyses of viral fitness landscapes and computational models of speciation. These data and simulation provide novel insights into sympatric speciation, the evolution of Muller-Dobzhansky incompatibilities, and a test of Adaptive Dynamics Theory’s prediction of shifting landscapes during diversification.
Host: Jamie Lloyd-Smith