Professorial lecture explores evolution in action
massey-university
Mon Mar 30 2009 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Professorial lecture explores evolution in action
Monday, 30 March 2009, 3:51 pm
Press Release: Massey University
Monday, March 30, 2009
Professorial lecture explores evolution in action
Understanding and predicting evolutionary patterns and trends by observing how bacterial populations develop in different settings is among the themes of a public lecture by Professor Paul Rainey at Massey’s Albany campus on Wednesday.
In his lecture Evolution in Action Professor Rainey, a world-renowned evolutionary geneticist, will outline some of his recent experiments and discuss findings from the "Rainey Lab" team based at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Studies at Albany.
Professor Rainey will discuss aspects of the study of genetic architecture – the way in which organisms are wired chromosomally to adapt, or not – to variations in their environment.
“The big question is to understand how these different wirings constrain future evolutionary change,” he says.
In the relatively new field of experimental evolution, Professor Rainey has been able to observe “evolution in action” using bacterial populations that grow rapidly and reach huge population sizes. Having observed evolutionary change, it becomes possible to unravel the mechanistic basis of this change and provide the insight into the moment-by-moment workings of evolution, he says.
“The underlying processes can be applied to all organisms. The holy grail is predicting evolution, and we can make some predictions based on our findings.”
During his youth, Professor Rainey developed an interest in many things biological – plants, fungi, bacteria; their interactions, their genetics but, mostly, their evolution. He completed his PhD at the University of Canterbury and has since worked in research at Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
In 2003 he returned to New Zealand as Chair of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Auckland.
He joined Massey in 2007 and was elected to the Academy of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
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He is currently Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the institute and director of the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution. He is also visiting professor at Stanford and co-director of the Hopkins Microbiology Course, and senior adjunct researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology.
Evolution in Action – Professorial lecture, 1 April, Sir Neil Waters Lecture Theatres, NW200, Albany Expressway, Gate 1 – 7pm. RSVP k.triggs@massey.ac.nz
ENDS
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