UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

M O L E C U L A R & C O M P U TAT I O NA L B I O LO G Y
COLLOQUIUM SERIES

Brandon S. Gaut, PhD

from
University of California, Irvine
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary
Biology
will present on

"The Marvelous Fluidity of Plant

Genomes: Examples from Maize
and Grape”

Abstract: Through population genomics, we know a great deal

Friday, February 15, 2019
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Ray R. Irani Hall
1050 Childs Way, RRI 101
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2910
For additional information,
contact:
Sergey Nuzhdin, PhD
snuzhdin@usc.edu
Jen Nelson
jmbrewer@usc.edu
about SNP variability within a species, but far less about variation in
genomic size and content, especially structural variation. In this talk,
I hope to provide insights into genome variability and the
evolutionary processes that affect that variability, based on two
projects. The first is a simple experiment: monitoring the effect of
selfing on outcrossed maize lines through time. Over the course of
just six generations, we detected strong selective purging, including
the loss of more than 400 Mbp (or about three Arabidopsis genomes)
from the genome of some lines. In theory, selfing decreases
heterozygosity at a rate of 0.50 per generation, but this theoretical
rate is slowed from the first generation onward, probably due to the
effects of deleterious recessive variants. In the second example, I
turn to grapes. By sequencing the highly heterozygous Chardonnay
genome, we show that structural variation is rampant within grapes
and that structural variants accumulate as deleterious recessives via
clonal propagation. Some of these variants have phenotypic effects.
The berry color locus is a particularly dramatic example,
where convergent phenotypic evolution in berry color is associated
with independent, large and complex inversions.