Population Genomics and Evolution
Our research focuses on the history of Zymoseptoria tritici at the worldwide scale and on the local adaptation of this important wheat pathogen to climatic conditions.
Understanding the processes involved in the evolution of species is one of the most fundamental questions in biology and the evolution of species in anthropic environments is an excellent framework to investigate this question. Indeed, such evolution can happen on a short timescale and usually involves strong selective pressures. This is especially true for crop pathogens that have to adapt to an extended range of environments through world-wide dispersal, to the pressure of resistant hosts, and to the constantly improved chemical control agents.
Our model organism is the fungal pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici (formerly Mycosphaerella graminicola), a globally distributed pathogen of wheat which causes one of the most damaging foliar disease in this critically important crop. We use a combination of approaches based on comparative genomics, population genomics, and phenotyping to better understand the ways in which neutral and adaptative processes have shaped the evolutive history of this species and its genomic architecture.
Our current projects are centered around the following topics:
- The world-wide history of Z. tritici based on the largest yet number of genomes from a fungal pathogen
- The local adaptation of Z. tritici to climatic conditions