Maintenance of adaptive genetic variation to cope with environmental change: considerations from population genomics in fish

Species across the globe are experiencing drastic changes in environmental conditions as a result of human activities. Understanding and predicting how organisms respond to human-driven environmental change is therefore a major concern.

Dr Bernatchez will discuss several mechanisms that may enhance the maintenancer of genetic variation and evolutionary potential, which have been overlooked and should be considered in future theoretical development and predictive models: the prevalence of soft sweeps, polygenic basis of adaptation, balancing selection and transient polymorphisms, parallel evolution, as well as epigenetic variation.