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Event Detail (Archived)

An Evolutionary Perspective on Meiotic Recombination in Vertebrates

  • This event already took place in November 2018
  • Caspary Auditorium

Event Details

Type
Friday Lecture Series
Speaker(s)
Molly Przeworski, Ph.D., professor, department of biological sciences and department of systems biology, Columbia University
Speaker bio(s)

Meiotic recombination is a fundamental genetic process that generates new combinations of alleles on which natural selection can act and ensures the proper alignment and segregation of chromosomes. Recombination events are initiated by double strand breaks deliberately inflicted on the genome during meiosis. As Molly Przeworski will discuss, in vertebrates, there appear to be two main mechanisms by which the locations of these double strand breaks are specified: through binding of the gene PRDM9 or by localization to promoter-like features of the genome. She will present her lab’s recent work linking these two mechanisms to dramatic differences in the evolutionary dynamics of recombination hotspots, and draw out potential implications for hybridization between closely related species.

Przeworski is a population geneticist at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the mechanisms that generate genetic variation and their evolution, as well as on the population dynamics of natural selection in humans and other species. She received a B.A. in mathematics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, working with Brian Charlesworth and Dick Hudson. Her postdoc was in the group of Peter Donnelly in the statistics department of the University of Oxford, which was followed by a two year stint as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Before moving to Columbia University, she was a faculty member at the University of Chicago (where she was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist) as well as, briefly, at Brown University.

Open to
Public
Host
Li Zhao
Reception
Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge
Contact
Justin Sloboda
Phone
(212) 327-7785
Sponsor
Justin Sloboda
(212) 327-7785
jsloboda@rockefeller.edu
Readings
http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=5772


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