Exploring the complexity plant–insect coevolutionary dynamics
04 Jul 2025 - Christopher Wheat, Stockholm University | 15h30 | CIBIO’s Auditorium, Campus de Vairão
REGULAR SEMINAR IN BIODIVERSITY AND EVOLUTION
Plants and insects are locked in a coevolutionary battle, where plants develop novel chemical defenses and insects adapt to overcome them. These interactions are responsible for much of the Earth’s biodiversity, with adaptations that are key innovations driving speciation bursts on both sides of the interaction. One persistent question is whether traits identified as key innovations on a macroevolutionary scale accurately predict functional performance and selection dynamics within species, as this necessitates characterizing their function, investigating their fitness consequences, and exploring the selection dynamics acting upon them. I will cover the nearly 20 years of my work studying interactions between mustard plants and their butterfly herbivores, focusing upon how diverse functional genomic insights from butterflies reveal complexity in these coevolutionary interactions.
Christopher Wheat is a professor of population genetics at Stockholm University, working at the intersection of ecological and evolutionary genomics to investigate how organisms adapt in the wild. His research focuses on identifying and studying genetic variation that has fitness consequences, spanning microevolutionary to macroevolutionary timescales. His work integrates multiple disciplines, including molecular biology, population genetics, physiology, biochemistry, ecology, and systematics. Also combining a wide range of methods, from traditional fieldwork with butterfly nets to modern 'omics approaches such as genome and transcriptome sequencing, and CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. Butterflies are the primary model system in his lab due to their central role in ecological and evolutionary theory and the availability of advanced genomic resources and functional tools, enabling robust connections to be drawn between genotype and phenotype.
[Host: BIODIV Week Committee]