Our Research

We study the processes that maintain ecological and genetic diversity in natural populations. The goal of studying the interaction between evolution and ecology is to understand evolutionary adaptation. We often use pathogens and disease as models to study rapid adaptation. By studying co-evolutionary dynamics we aim to understand disease risk and epidemiology in natural environments.

Our research questions require integrative methods from field surveys to laboratory experiments, taking advantage of toolboxes in population and functional genomics and mathematical modelling. Often we need to establish new methods and adapt existing ones to our needs, hardware and analytical tools alike.

Find current and long-term projects on the respective research topic pages.

The Sex Question

Why is sexual reproduction so widespread, even though asexual populations seem to have a reproductive advantage and should outcompete sexual populations?

The Sex question

The Apoximis Question

What are the mechanims of female clones emerging from a sexual population?

The Apomixis Question

Toxic Killers....

...and what to do about it (if you are a yeast)

Insects act as vectors for yeasts and potentially also for viruses. All these interacting species are model organisms in their own right, providing a combined array of established molecular and genetic tools to study their coevolutionary and population dynamics.

The (Killer) Yeast System

Past Projects

Some of our projects have been finished, the papers are published and some of the involved scientist have move on to new shores. However, the topics are of course nonetheless still of interest and they show the range of questions we work on in the Aquatic Ecology group.

Past Projects