PHOTO CREDIT: Scott Villa

INTROSYM

PHOTO CREDIT: Scott Villa

INTROSYM

Despite their diversity, relevance, and conservation status, fundamental aspects of the Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology of symbionts are inadequately understood, especially when compared to what is known about free-living organisms. This lack of knowledge is particularly severe in the understanding of the role of hybridization and introgression, a process with a vital but still poorly understood role in the Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology of many taxa.

The overall aim of this proposal is to understand how hybridization operates in symbionts, a group of taxa exhibiting unique eco-evolutionary trajectories, and for which hybridization has almost never been studied. The research objectives are:

  1. To investigate the pattern of introgression across the global tree of lice.
  2. To research the role of introgression in shaping key eco-evolutionary variables related to dispersal and host-switching.
  3. To study the relationship between introgression levels and symbiont extinction rate.







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Jorge Doña
Associate Professor

Publications

While mitochondrial genome content and organization is quite diverse across all Eukaryotes, most bilaterian animal mitochondrial …

Organisms that have repeatedly evolved similar morphologies owing to the same selective pressures provide excellent cases in which to …

The effective population size (Ne) of an organism is expected to be generally proportional to the total number of individuals in a …

Mammals host a wide diversity of parasites. Lice, comprising more than 5,000 species, are one group of ectoparasites whose major …

Parasite diversification is influenced by many of the same factors that affect speciation of free-living organisms, such as …

Organisms vary in their dispersal abilities, and these differences can have important biological consequences, such as impacting the …

Symbionts have a unique mode of life that has attracted the attention of ecologists and evolutionary biologists for centuries. As a …