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The  2010 meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) took place at the Lyon Convention Center located between the river Rhône and the Parc de la Tête d’Or in July 4-8 2010 . The meeting attracted about 1,100 delegates from 45 countries (with most delegates coming from the USA), which made it one of the largest SMBE meetings. The scientific program included 4 plenary lectures and 28 symposia grouped into four general topics: Genome Evolution, Population Genomics/Theory, Phylogenomics, Molecular Evolution and Phenotypes. As usual the society organized the Fitch prize symposium and the undergraduate mentoring program poster session. In total, the scientific program included about 250 talks and about 600 posters. The gala dinner and award ceremony took place at the Brasserie Georges with 600 of the participants. For the first time at an SMBE meeting, plenary sessions and Fitch session were filmed and can be found below:

 

Plenary sessions:

Jenny GRAVES, The Australian National University Canberra, AUSTRALIA
Weird animal genomes and sex

In humans and other mammals, females have two X chromosomes, but males have a single X, and a Y that bears a gene (SRY) that induces testis differentiation and switches on hormones that masculinize the embryo. The human X is a middle-sized chromosome, rich in “brains-and-balls” genes involved in reproduction and intelligence (often both), and thought to have had a major role in human evolution. The tiny Y is a genetic wasteland – full of repetitive sequence and bearing only 45 genes, most active only in testis. How did human sex chromosomes get to be so weird? Our strategy is to compare the chromosomes, genes and DNA in distantly related mammals and even birds and reptiles (which have completely different sex determining systems). The genomes of Australia’s unique kangaroos and platypus, now being completely sequenced, are a goldmine of new information. Kangaroo sex chromosomes reveal the original mammal sex chromosomes, while the bizarre platypus sex chromosomes (more related to those of birds) tell us that our sex chromosomes are relatively young. The human X and Y evolved from an ordinary chromosome pair as the Y degraded progressively. The Y is predicted to disappear in just 5 million years. If humans don’t become extinct, new sex determining genes and chromosomes will evolve, maybe leading to the evolution of new hominid species.


Jody HEY, Rutgers University New Jersey, USA
On the causes of species (Nei Lecture)

Species are complicated. While the taxonomic rank of species is a necessary concept, the actual identification of species is an often subjective process. And once they are identified, the elucidation of why two species have diverged from a common ancestor, is difficult to study. In recent decades the focus of genetic research on divergence has shifted down from the taxonomic rank of species to focus on populations. Populations can be more objective, and divergence of populations is at least a necessary process for the formation of species. Results from a great many research programs seem to have overturned the once dominant view of how species form, and replaced it with a much more complex framework involving a large role for diversifying natural selection, often in the face of gene exchange. Results from analyses of Isolation-with-Migration models support this picture, with many divergent populations showing clear signs of having exchanged genes during their divergence.


Katie PEICHEL, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Seattle, USA
Fishing for the secrets of vertebrate evolution

What is the genetic basis of morphological and behavioral variation between species? How do these differences lead to the formation of new species? In order to address these questions experimentally, the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) has been developed as a new genetic and genomic model system. Threespine sticklebacks have evolved an incredible diversity of morphologies and behaviors in freshwater populations in the last 10,000 years, and we have the ability to cross virtually any two diverse populations of sticklebacks using artificial fertilization in the lab. Therefore, they are an ideal system to determine the number of genetic changes that control morphological and behavioral differences between species, to map the location of these changes, and to ultimately find the DNA sequence changes responsible for evolutionary modifications in vertebrates. Recent work in my laboratory has focused on both morphological and behavioral traits that contribute to reproductive isolation between stickleback populations, providing insight into the genetic and developmental processes that underlie speciation.


Patrick FORTERRE, Institut Pasteur Paris, FRANCE
The origin and nature of viruses

Viruses are the most abundant living organisms in the biosphere. Recent work has shown that they   are also very ancient, i.e. they predated modern cells, the descendents of LUCA (the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor). Traditional views have confused viruses with their virions (the viral gene dissemination system) and underestimated their role in biological evolution. Recently, a better understanding of viruses antiquity and diversity, as well as the discovery of giant viruses, have led to new concepts on the origin and nature of viruses. Focusing on the intracellular stage of the virus life cycle, some evolutionists have started to realize that viruses can create new proteins (something well known by virologists) and that many proteins now active in Archaea, Bacteria or Eukarya might have had initially a viral origin. This seems to be especially true for proteins involved in DNA manipulation, suggesting that DNA itself might have originated in ancient viral lineages. I will illustrate this point by our recent discovery of new families of viral/plasmid DNA polymerases and DNA topoisomerases that have recently invaded some cellular genomes. I will conclude that the interaction between viruses and cells has always been the major engine of biological evolution in a Darwinian scheme ; viruses being both the main actors responsible for both cell diversification and selection.      

 

Walter Fitch Student Award:

Yingguang frank CHAN
From Trait to Base Pairs: Adaptive Evolution of Pelvic Reduction in Sticklebacks by Recurrent Deletion of a Pitx1 Enhancer

Marc HOEPPNER
Using a comparative genomics approach to test the RNA world origin of introns

Daniel MATUTE
The rate of evolution of hybrid incompatibilities in Drosophila

Susanne PFEIFER
PanMap: Mapping genomic variation in chimpanzees

Melody RYNERSON
Characterizing the abalone sperm proteome and the evolution of a newly discovered sperm protein

James SUN
A high resolution estimate of the human microsatellite mutation rate

Takashi TSUCHIMATSU (Winner of the 2010 W. Fitch prize)
Evolution of self-compatibility in Arabidopsis thaliana by a mutation in the male specificity gene

Maria WARNEFORS
Transposable elements: insertion pattern and impact on gene expression evolution in hominids



All the contents remain the entire property of the authors.
Multimedia was created at ENS de Lyon by UNIS and ENSMedia, sessions were filmed by chezmoiprod, editing and synchronization of the slides were done by Olivier Chassaing, pHD student at IGFL, ENS de Lyon.
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