Abstract
Comprising more than 30,000 species, teleost fishes account for roughly half of all extant vertebrates. Teleost fishes are ancient tetraploids descended from an ancestral whole-genome duplication that occurred around 300 million years ago, and that may have contributed to the impressive diversification of this clade. This whole-genome duplication has left a lasting imprint on extant teleost genomes, as a high fraction of teleost genomes remain recognizably duplicated to this day. This ancient tetraploidization event poses challenges to evolutionary and comparative genomics in teleost fishes. In this talk, I will present how we leveraged this duplicated structure in teleost genomes as an opportunity to answer two important questions in the field. First, we resolved the early phylogenetic relationships between extant clades of teleosts, which had resisted molecular evolution analyses based on sequence data. Second, we showed that the tetraploidization event likely arose within a single parental species rather through hybridization, another common mechanism of whole-genome duplication. Together, these results shed new light on the evolutionary history of fishes, and also demonstrate how using genome structures as evolutionary characters can elucidate very old questions in evolutionary biology.
About Dr Camille Berthelot
Dr Berthelot is a junior group leader and heads the Comparative Functional Genomics group at the Institut Pasteur. Her research focuses on dramatic genomic changes and the acquisition of novel evolutionary traits. In relation to this, her group studies the evolution of genomes and gene regulation in mammals and fish.
More information
Please contact Emma Whittington in order to get access to the Zoom link