Background: Reproductive isolation can result from adaptive processes (e.g., ecological speciation and mutation-order speciation) or stochastic processes such as "system drift" model. Ecological speciation predicts barriers to gene flow between populations ...
The adaptation of organisms to their environment depends on the innovative potential inherent to genetic variation. In complex organisms such as mammals, processes like development and immunity require tight gene regulation. Complex forms emerge more often ...
Acinetobacter baumannii is a dangerous nosocomial pathogen, especially due to its ability to rapidly acquire new genetic traits, including antibiotic resistance genes (ARG). In A. baumannii, natural competence for transformation, one of the primary modes o ...
The study of insular populations was key in the development of evolutionary theory. The successful colonisation of an island depends on the geographic context, and specific characteristics of the organism and the island, but also on stochastic processes. A ...
The Montecristo wild goat is an endangered feral population that has been on the homonymous island in the Tuscan Archipelago since ancient times. The origins of Montecristo goats are still debated, with authors dating their introduction either back to Neol ...
The climate fluctuations of the Quaternary shaped the movement of species in and out of glacial refugia. In Europe, the majority of species followed one of the described traditional postglacial recolonization routes from the southern peninsulas towards the ...
Organohalide respiration (OHR) is a bacterial anaerobic process that use halogenated compounds, e.g. tetrachloroethene (PCE), as terminal electron acceptors. D. restrictus strain PER-K23, an obligate OHR bacterium (OHRB), and D. hafniense strain TCE1, a ba ...
Cells consume extra-cellular nutrients and resources to maintain cellular fitness. Extra-cellular conditions vary over time. Cellular programs encoded in genes adjust to adapt to the environments. Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) have evolved to be responsi ...
High genetic variation and extensive gene flow may help forest trees with adapting to ongoing climate change, yet the genetic bases underlying their adaptive potential remain largely unknown. We investigated range-wide patterns of potentially adaptive gene ...
The focus of the work presented in this thesis is the exploration of the genetic architecture of complex human traits - at the dawn of genomic medicine.The underlying mechanisms explaining the enormously polygenic nature of most human complex traits are ...
