Willi, Yvonne, Prof. Dr.

Prof. Dr. Yvonne Willi at University of Neuchâtel

PhD in Natural Sciences, University of Zürich, 2004

Research interests

I am interested in the forces shaping genetic variation within populations and the impact of the genetic architecture of traits on evolutionary change. So far, my focus was on population size and how it affects the processes of inbreeding and genetic drift, the balance between selection and drift, as well as current fitness and future evolvability. A new project examines how plant mating systems influence genetic variation and genetic correlations in quantitative characters.

Arabidopsis project:

Studies of plant mating systems have long focused on the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of inbreeding and outbreeding. The project reverses the chain of causation to ask how the mating system affects the genetic architecture of ecologically relevant traits.

Rhynchosporium project:

Rhynchosporium is a fungus that has recently switched from a wild host plant onto two agriculturally important species, barley and rye, and has spread around the globe. In this project, we ask how genetic drift and natural selection have shaped patterns of genetic variation in phenotypically expressed traits.