Université de Strasbourg

Fellows seminar - Elucidating how traits are heritable through functional and population genomics

October 15, 2020
From 12:30 until 14:00
Salle Amériques, MISHA

By Joseph Schacherer, 2017 Fellow

Elucidating the causes of the awesome phenotypic diversity observed in natural populations is a major challenge in biology. More than a century after the rediscovery of Mendel’s law, the genetic architecture of traits still resists generalisation.

This is increasingly evident as shown by recent genome-wide association studies, where identified causal loci explained relatively little of the heritability of most complex traits, leading to the concept of “missing heritability”. It also clearly indicates that a better understanding of the genetic architecture of traits requires a deeper knowledge of the variability of the phenotypic effect of genetic variants across an entire population.

In this context, we married classical and high-throughput genetic methods with new approaches based on population genomics in order to connect the phenotypic and allelic landscape. To do so, we benefited from the powerful budding yeast model system. With our completion of the whole genome resequencing of over 1011 natural isolates (see the 1002 Yeast Genomes Project, plus the accompanying phenotyping efforts, we obtained one of the best understandings of the natural genetic and phenotypic diversity of any eukaryote model system to date.

 

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