Institut Jacques Monod Seminar – Peter Andolfatto

Invited by the Courtier, Peter Andolfatto (Professor, Dept. of Biological Sciences, Columbia University) will present an Institut Jacques Monod seminar on the theme:

The evolution of toxin-resistant Na+,K+-ATPases: new insights from frogs and fireflies 

We study the process of adaptive evolution through the lens of repeated adaptation of many distantly species to a similar selection pressure (i.e. “parallel evolution”). Over the past decade, we have explored patterns of adaptation in the context of animals that have specialized in eating plants, or other animals, that contain toxic cardiotonic steroids (CTS). CTS are toxic to animals because they inhibit sodium-potassium ATPase, a key enzyme in animals needed in everything from maintaining cell homeostasis, muscle contraction to neuron activity. Here I review our most recent work combining comparative molecular evolution, molecular and biochemical assays and in vivo engineering of Drosophila to deduce the rules governing the adaptive evolution of CTS resistance in animals. Together, our results have interesting implications for how epistasis and pleiotropy both limit the rate of adaptive protein evolution and increase its predictability.