Séminaire Biogeco - Airial Pierroton

Andrin Gross

Digging deeper: From population genetics to population genomics of invasive forest pathogens

In January 2017 I started my IDEX postdoctoral fellowship in the GEMFOR team at INRA BIOGECO. My seminar talk will be a combination of a summary of my previous work and a short outlook of what I’m going to investigate at INRA Biogeco. During my PhD I studied the invasive ash dieback pathogen Hymenoscyphus fraxineus. I characterized the pathogens reproduction system as well as its population structure using microsatellite markers. During my first postdoc I described three closely related species of the ash dieback pathogen using molecular phylogenetics and I started to investigate and describe two interesting emerging tree pathogens new to central Europe on Fagus sylvatica and Acer pseudoplatanoides/campestre. Here, at INRA Pierroton I work together with Marie-Laure Desprez-Loustau and Cyril Dutech to study the invasion history and adaptation process of oak powdery mildew in Europe. Therefore, I will acquire genomic resources for two closely related oak powdery mildew species by PacBio SMRT sequencing. Subsequent population genomic analyses will be carried out by direct genotyping of oak powdery mildew populations from Europe using ddRAD sequencing. The study will hopefully contribute to our understanding of invasion and adaptation processes of alien pathogens.

Katharina Budde

Evolutionary processes in conifers and tropical trees

I joined BioGeCo as an IdEx postdoctoral fellow in September 2016. In the seminar I will present some previous work and afterwards introduce the project I am working on currently at BioGeCo. During my PhD at INIA Madrid, I worked on the genetic bases of a fire-related trait and on population genetic effects of different fire regimes in Mediterranean conifers. I also completed a phylogeographic study on Symphonia globulifera, a tropical tree species.  During my postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, I studied gene expression in Nordmann fir (Abies nordmanniana) attacked by a pest, the silver fir woolly adelgid (Dreyfusia nordmannianae). At BioGeCo, I am working with Myriam Heuertz on tropical tree species complexes. We aim to disentangle the phylogenetic relationship in two species complexes, Symphonia (Clusiaceae) from Madagascar and Eschweilera/Lecythis (Lecythidaceae) from French Guiana. In hybridising species, we will study also adaptive allele sharing with a specific focus on drought resistance genes.