The University of California, Berkeley, Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity will present the A. Starker Leopold Lecture "Origins and Innovations of Science in the U.S. National Parks," September 27, 2023, at the University of California Botanical Garden. Conservation writer Jerry Emory and national park science leader Alison Forrestel, Ph.D., will speak. Patrick Gonzalez, Ph.D., climate change scientist and Executive Director of the Institute, will moderate the event.
Past PMB Seminars
For a schedule of all Plant & Microbial Biology events, seminars, and lectures visit our calendar.
Trait-based exploration and simulation of soil microbiomes
Soil is the most biodiverse habitat on Earth and regulates global biogeochemical cycles. This "life support system" provides crucial resources for humanity. However, it has been degraded by past land-use practices and is increasingly threatened by changing climatic conditions, as well as the pressures resulting from growing populations and economies. Microbes play a vital role in soil function, and consequently, our understanding of soil function and our ability to predict it are limited by our knowledge of the functional traits of soil microbes, most of which may never be cultivated for isolated study.
Advancements in technology continue to unveil new lineages and hypothesized functions of soil microbes. Importantly, the functions of soil microbes can now be linked within 'species' units by directly assembling genomes from soil communities. To address the complexity of soil microbiomes we have developed a hierarchical trait-based approach that distills microbial functional diversity into tractable units (guilds). In this seminar, I will discuss recent work harnessing the expanding resource of soil bacterial and archaeal genomes to investigate trait variation and trait linkage. I will also present our research on the development of trait-based models, including a novel approach to derive parameters for uptake kinetics directly from genomes, and provide examples of emergent behavior resulting from the interactions of metabolic, thermodynamic, and life history traits. Finally, I will conclude by sharing some thoughts and examples of how to apply these data-driven microbial simulation approaches to complex ecosystems.
The genomics of climate change adaptation (and extinction)
The ongoing climate change has put a spotlight on rapid evolutionary processes that could aid species adapt to new environments. However, many questions remain unanswered: What is the genetic architecture traits influencing fitness across environments? Is this genomic architecture predictable? Can we understand genetic constraints across multiple adaptive traits? How is genetic variation lost during extinction? To address these questions, we combine statistical genomics with experimental ecology and genetic engineering approaches using the plant species Arabidopsis thaliana as our experimental climate change genetics model and scaling up insights with publicly available genomes of diverse plant species.
[Buchanan Lecture] The “endless forms”: Genetics, development, and evolution of flower diversity
In this talk I will discuss the use of monkeyflowers to probe the genetic and molecular bases of floral trait variation among species, to characterize the developmental mechanisms of pattern formation, and to test the adaptive significance of floral trait variation in the evolution of pollination syndromes.