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"The Marvelous Fluidity of Plant Genomes: Examples from Maize and Grape”

Abstract: Through population genomics, we know a great deal about SNP variability within a species, but far less about variation in genomic size and content, especially structural variation.  In this talk, I hope to provide insights into genome variability and the evolutionary processes that affect that variability, based on two projects.  The first is a simple experiment: monitoring the effect of selfing on outcrossed maize lines through time.  Over the course of just six generations, we detected strong selective purging, including the loss of more than 400 Mbp (or about three Arabidopsis genomes) from the genome of some lines.  In theory, selfing decreases heterozygosity at a rate of 0.50 per generation, but this theoretical rate is slowed from the first generation onward, probably due to the effects of deleterious recessive variants.  In the second example, I turn to grapes.  By sequencing the highly heterozygous Chardonnay genome, we show that structural variation is rampant within grapes and that structural variants accumulate as deleterious recessives via clonal propagation.  Some of these variants have phenotypic effects.  The berry color locus is a particularly dramatic example, where convergent phenotypic evolution in berry color is associated with independent, large and complex inversions.

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