[Mitarbeiter.zoologie] Zoology seminar next week

[Michael Gerth]

Dear all,

it is my pleasure to invite you to a spontaneous zoology seminar next 
week. Our speaker is Wolfgang Miller from the Medical University of 
Vienna, and he will talk about

"Sex & Germs & Speciation: The Wonderful World of Neotropical Wolbachia".

The talk will be held next Thursday, *May 16, 4pm at Hoher Weg 8, 
Seminar Room 2.07*. All interested are very welcome - please feel free 
to share this invite with your groups. Wolfgang's talk will be followed 
by drinks & dinner at a location tba.

Best wishes,
Michael






Talk abstract


Sex & Germs & Speciation: The Wonderful World of Neotropical Wolbachia

Selfish genetic elements (SGEs) like transposons, viruses, bacteria, 
archaea and protists are universal life entities with the capacity to 
replicate faster than the host and to coevolve tightly by fluctuating 
waves of conflict and cooperation. In the light of the Holobiome 
concept, the phenotype of an organism is formed not only by its nuclear 
and organelle genomic compounds but also by the genomic entities of its 
cohabitating SGE symbionts. Thereby, SGEs are now considered as 
important factors to drive along the genetic diversity and speciation of 
their hosts, even within short evolutionary periods of time. As shown by 
the latitudinal diversity gradient, tropical organisms have a much 
higher diversification and speciation rate than temperate ones, and 
thereby are ideal systems for studying the tempo and mode of SGE-driven 
host speciation under experimental conditions.
Drosophila paulistorum spp. is a neotropical species complex that became 
famous since the 1960s by Dobzhansky and Ehrman as a reference model 
system to study the causes and consequences of incipient speciation in 
nature, but also under lab-controlled conditions. We show that the 
maternally-transmitted endosymbiotic Wolbachia bacteria are fixed 
mutualistic entity of all D. paulistorum flies, which are restricted to 
defined functional host tissues by autophagy, and importantly, direct 
sexual mating behavior of both sexes and hence drive reproductive 
isolation between closely related neotropical fly species.






-- 
Michael Gerth
Head of Junior Research Group "Symbiont Evolution"
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research
(iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
Junior Professor for Evolution and Biodiversity
Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg

Office: Puschstraße 4, 04103 Leipzig, B.01.23
Phone: +49 341 9739145
Web: https://www.idiv.de/en/symbiont-evolution.html
Twitter: @gerth_micha