Dr Homayoun Bagheri from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin will give a talk on "Systems of inheritance and the shifting relation between mutations and the phenotype".
 Homayoun Bagheri |
Place: Agricultural University of Norway (NLH) - Ås, Animal Science Building, room H185
In this talk, Homayoun Bagheri considers the premise that a given phenotype can be produced by different genotypes. In other words, the consequences of a many-to-one relation between genotype and phenotype. Such a scenario can be extended to the notion that a given phenotype can be associated with different genotypes in which mutations have different variational effects. The latter situation can serve as the first step towards the evolution of distinct inheritance systems. Dr Bagheri will address two separate examples in which the variational properties of a population can change during the course of evolution. The first is the evolution of dominance, which is one of the "entry level" problems with regard to the evolution of genetic systems. Nonetheless -as an indication of its difficulty- it is telling that the issue is still unresolved after almost seventy five years since its introduction as a research problem. Dr Bagheri will present some theoretical results on the evolution of dominance in metabolic pathways, and possible avenues for resolving some aspects of the problem.
The second example concerns the evolution of bacterial populations. Using data based on multi-locus sequence typing, Homayoun Bagheri will discuss analyses indicating that the variational properties of sub-populations can differ, and how this affects the relation between genotype-based phylogenies and phenotype-based phylogenies. Both the examples on dominance and bacteria are used as an illustration of different cases in which the evolutionary process affects the inheritance of phenotypes.
