Two ARCAD scientists are members of the scientific committee of the A nnual Meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution  (Lyons, France, from July 4-8, 2010) and will organize local symposia during this event.

Sylvain Glémin (CNRS, France) will organize a symposium on Plant ecological genomics with Xavier Vekemans (University of Lille 1, France), while Nicolas Galtier (CNRS - Université Montpellier 2, France) will organize a symposium on Species life-history traits and molecular evolution with Adam Eyre-Walker (University of Sussex, U.K.).

Symposium: Plant ecological genomics

 Abstract
Population genomics, molecular evolution, and ecological genetics are complementary approaches to deciphering the genetic basis of adaptation. In plant species, integration of genome-wide polymorphism data to ecological and life-history trait analyses is fruitful to understand the evolutionary forces shaping adaptive traits in wild or domesticated species. Coupling genome-wide approaches or detailed analyses of specific candidate chromosomal regions, population genetic models, and field data is becoming possible in a growing number of species. The perspective of application of the most recent genomic scan approaches, and association mapping procedures, would be to identify recent genomic targets of selection and address issues such as the relative importance of coding versus non-coding targets, the functional relationships among targets, and the occurrence of parallel or convergent adaptive events. Also, approaches combining genome-wide polymorphism with descriptive environmental data would lead to identify environmental variables that contribute most to shaping adaptive evolution.This symposium will be dedicated to theoretical and empirical studies aiming at revealing the genomic foundation of adaptation in plant species with special emphasis on the links between species biology and ecology, population genetics, and evolutionary genomics.

Invited Speakers
Deborah Charlesworth (Edinburgh University, UK)
Nucleotide diversity of X-linked, Y-linked and autosomal genes in the plant S. latifolia.
Maarten Koornneef (Max Planck Institute, Germany)
From QTL to genes to population in Arabidopsis seed dormancy research
Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra (Davis University, USA)
Ecological genomics of maize and teosinte

Symposium: Species life-history traits and molecular evolution

 Abstract
Molecular evolutionary biologists benefit from an enormous amount of data (thanks to genomics), and a rigorous theoretical framework (thanks to population genetics). We should therefore be in position to understand patterns of genome variation, and link them to species biology and ecology. Remarkably, a number of basic properties of genome content and dynamics are still largely mysterious. We do not clearly know why some genomes are large and some are small, why some are GC-rich and some AT-rich, why some proteomes evolve faster than others, why some species are genetically more diverse than others, why some, but not all, undergo selection for codon usage, etc… Genome evolution is governed by population genetic parameters (e.g. mutation rate, population size, recombination rate, selection coefficient), which are most likely influenced by species life history traits (e.g. generation time, abundance, mating system). The aim of this symposium is to review current research linking molecular evolutionary processes and species biology, across diverse organisms and time scales. The emergence of very-high throughput sequencing technology, which gives relatively cheap access to genome-wide data in nonmodel species, opens obvious opportunities in this area.
 
Invited Speakers
Michael Lynch (Indiana University, USA)
John Welch (CNRS Roscoff, France)
David Mark-Welch (Woods Hole, USA)