Dear colleagues,

please remember today’s Biology Thursday seminar 5th Oct, 12:15 on zoom (link below) with Dr. Ilkka Kronholm, University of Jyväskylä, on

"Influence of chromatin structure on spontaneous mutations and methylation changes in a filamentous fungus"

Abstract

Everywhere we look, organism are very well adapted to their environments. Adaptation is the result of natural selection, but natural selection needs variation to function and this variation is generated by mutation. While we understand fairly well how natural selection works, our understanding of how variation is generated and what are its properties is more limited. My group studies the properties of genetic and epigenetic variation. Recently we did a mutation accumulation experiment in the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa to study how chromatin structure influences the mutation rate and what is the rate of spontaneous epigenetic changes in N. crassa. We observed that mutation rate is higher in heterochromatic regions marked by H3K9me3 and H3K27me3. I’ll also show some preliminary results regarding spontaneous methylation changes and how chromatin stucture influences recombination. To understand how different processes shape genetic variation across the genome, we can generate better null models to study how natural selection shapes genetic variation.