Research

The group has wide interests within the field of evolutionary genetics, but current research is focussed on two themes.

The first theme is evolution of reproductive isolation. When different populations or species hybridise, their divergent alleles are brought together in new combinations. The fitness of these combinations will help to determine the outcome of the hybridisation, and might also contain information about the mode of evolutionary divergence between the populations, and shed light on broader patterns of gene interaction. Decades of work on hybridisation has revealed a number of robust patterns that appear predictably in very distantly related groups (“Haldane’s Rule” is probably the best known). We have been trying to develop a theoretical framework that might to help to explain these patterns in a unified way, and combine simplicity and flexibility so as to be useful for data analysis.


Representative publications:


Schneemann H*, De Sanctis B*, Roze D, Bierne N, Welch JJ (2020).  The geometry and genetics of hybridization. Evolution 74: 2575-2590. doi:10.1111/evo.14116


Simon A, Bierne N, Welch JJ (2018). Coadapted genomes and selection on hybrids: Fisher's geometric model explains a variety of empirical patterns. Evolution Letters 2: 472-498.doi:10.1002/evl3.66


Fraïsse C, Gunnarsson PA, Roze D, Bierne N, Welch JJ (2016). The genetics of speciation: insights from Fisher’s geometric model. Evolution 70: 1450-1464. doi:10.1111/evo.12968.



The second theme involves evolutionary inference from the genomes of microbial pathogens. The aim here is to use the tools of classical population genetics and molecular phylogenetics to make inferences about pathogen ecology and epidemiology, that might be useful in combatting infectious disease.


Representative publications:


Weinert LA, Welch JJ (2017). Why might bacterial pathogens have small genomes? Trends Ecol Evol 32: 936-947. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2017.09.006


Hadjirin NF, Miller EL, Murray GGR, Yen PLK, Phuc HD, Wileman TM, Hernandez-Garcia J, Williamson SM, Parkhill J, Maskell DJ, Zhou R, Fittipaldi N, Gottschalk N, Tucker AW, Hoa NT, Welch JJ, Weinert LA (2021). Large scale genomic analysis of antimicrobial resistance in the zoonotic pathogen Streptococcus suis. BMC Biology (in press).



Home    People    Research    Publications    Software    Collaborators