International workshop on Evolution in the Time of Genomics - part 11

International workshop on Evolution in the Time of Genomics

7 — 9 May 2012 | Venice, Italy
Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti
Palazzo Franchetti

Mark Ptashne "Basic models tell us more than we can at first know" -Karl Popper

James Shapiro "Rethinking the (Im)possible"

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Molecular evolution was born fifty years before the planned
Conference, with a seminal paper by Zuckerkandl and Pauling (1962)
which demonstrated that aminoacid changes in the globins followed a
molecular clock and could provide information on the phylogeny of
vertebrates and on the timing of their appearance on earth.

Principal themes and objectives of the event From changes in
aminoacids to changes in nucleotides, the molecular level has provided
an essential input into evolutionary investigations for the past
decades. More recently, the molecular level has moved from the genes
to the genome, so far mainly in the case of vertebrates (in which the
coding sequences only represent about 2% of the total). The
availability of full genome sequences has provided new possibilities
for investigators in the field and major problems can now be tackled
in a very precise way using bioinformatic tools. Indeed, an example of
this approach has been the recent solution (Bernardi, 2007)of a
twenty-year-old debate, that between neutralists and selectionists.
One of the major current debates concerns adaptive vs. non-adaptive
evolution. Random events in evolution were originally raised as a
fundamental problem by Jacques Monod in his famous book "Chance and
necessity". The problem has now been shifted to the genome level. A
preliminary discussion took place in October 2010 in a Meeting "Chance
and Necessity in Evolution" (Ravello, Italy; papers are in press in a
special issue of Genome Biology and Evolution). The proposed meeting
should go deeper into such a basic issue. While this will be one of
the main subject of the meeting in which different views will confront
each other (with Bernardi, Jarosz, Koonin, Ohta, Ptashne), other basic
topics in Genome Evolution will be addressed. Werner Arber, Hamilton
Smith (two Nobel Laureates) and George Church will discuss in depth
the results obtained so far "directing" evolution in microbial
systems, their interpretation and even the ethical issues raised.
Davidson, Gehring and Gojobori will deal with the evolution of
developmental processes; Martin, Saccone and Wallace with the
evolution of mitochondrial genomes; Okada and Shapiro with the impact
of mobile elements on genome evolution; Jeffreys and Saitou with
recombination and biased gene conversion; Bustamante, Felsenfeld,
Hartl and Haussler with regulation of gene expression and copy number
variation in the human genome. Last but not least, Emile Zuckerkandl
will recollect the beginning of Molecular Evolution.

• Category

  Science & Technology