The Evolutionary Biology Center hosts one of the world’s largest aggregations of evolutionary biologists, and is a prime research environment for a wide range of fields in evolutionary biology (see “http://www.ebc.uu.se/” for more information).
Project description: Males and females have distinct life styles and experience different selection pressures. These differences in selection have likely given rise to many of the striking sexual dimorphisms in life history, morphology and behaviour observed across animal taxa.
There are however good reasons to believe that, typically, the evolution of pronounced sex-differences is severely constrained by the fact that males and females share most of their genome. Genes that have net benefits to one sex therefore often inflict costs when expressed in the other. The result is a genetic conflict over optimal male and female phenotypes, with potentially grave and wide-ranging evolutionary consequences. This form of sexual conflict is a key focus of current evolutionary research and is predicted to be a crucial mechanism maintaining genetic variation within populations, imposing demographic costs to natural populations, and setting limits to rates of adaptation.
The focus of this project is to understand how new mutations and cryptic genetic variation affect male and female phenotypes, and how adaptation from these sources of genetic variation influence male and female evolution and the importance of sexual conflict in novel environments. The successful candidate will utilize insect model systems to perform quantitative genetic breeding designs and/or laboratory evolution experiments, to estimate genetic architecture and selection on important fitness traits in males and females. It will also be possible to combine quantitative genetic data with genome sequence data, to link variation in male and female phenotypes to variation at the molecular level.
This PhDposition forms a part of a new project on genetic conflict, funded by the European Research Council and the Swedish Research Council. The entire project employs some 7-8 PhD students and postdocs, as well as a full time research engineer, a research professor and a senior PI, and strongly encourages interactions and collaborations within the group. Dr. David Berger and Prof. Gran Arnqvist will act as supervisors for the successful applicant.
