Overview
Adaptation by natural selection is the central process in evolution and is at the core of some of the greatest problems facing humanity. From cancer to viral and bacterial pathogenicity, to evolution of drug and pesticide resistance, to agriculture and survival of biological diversity in the face of rapid global change, many of our most daunting challenges are related to rapid evolutionary adaptation.
Adaptation was generally thought of as idiosyncratic and difficult to study - adaptive mutations are rare, happened a long time ago, and have been obscured by subsequent changes. Yet, to build a rich and predictive theory of adaptation, one must first obtain rich empirical data.
We must identify individual adaptive mutations
We must do it at a scale where we can infer probability distributions rather than rely on individual examples
We must find a way to build full genotype-phenotype-fitness maps across environments
Because rapid evolution occurs on timescales of ecology, one must also understand how rapid evolution interacts with ecological dynamics
Over the past 10 years our lab has shifted largely to the study of rapid evolution, primarily in large populations where adaptation is not limited by mutation – either because de novo mutation arises commonly in the population or the standing variation is abundant. The two key research directions in the lab are: 1) empirical studies of rapid evolution in real time and 2) inference of evolutionary forces and causes of evolution from static genomic data. These directions are distinct but they are in conversation with one another. Indeed, ultimately we must build a theory of adaptation that can naturally accommodate observations of the long-term evolutionary patterns evident in genomic data as well as the directly observable short-term dynamics of evolution.
