Every day, walking in a garden and looking at our plate demonstrates the incredible diversity of life on Earth. Biological diversity, recently named"Biodiversity", is a multiplicity of species but also shapes, colours, characters, which evolves at different timescales and build a large variety of environments, with their own community of species.
Our research interests focus on how evolutionary pressures shape the diversity of species and phenotypes, as well as the underlying genetic variation. Reciprocally, we are interested in genetic architecture, and particularly structural variants, to better understand how they may play a special role in the evolution of biological diversity.
Currently we have several main projects. Most of our group is supported by an ERC Starting grant which aims to address the role of structural variants in eco-evolutionary processes, which includes both inter-species comparison and a large experimental part on seaweed flies. Another ongoing project with seaweed flies targets genetic load, but also polymorphic supergenes involved in adaptation to heterogenous environments at micro and macro-evolutionary level in collaboration with Sweden, Canada, USA and New Zealand. We are also involved in an ANR project which aims to investigate signatures of balancing selection in the genomes in collaboration with a team in Lyon and Paris. In collaboration with Brest, we are also starting investigations on Octopus in Brittanny using genomic approaches. You can find more details about our research on the research page and about our little group on the people page
If you are interested in doing a post-doc, PhD, visit or internship with us, please contact claire.merot[@]univ-rennes.fr
Studying evolution requires the integration of several approaches and we are working with a combination of different methods: observations and experimentation in the field, molecular biology, genomics, lab analysis and modelling.
Please follow the links for our publications or my github page.
You can contact me by e-mail at [first name].[surname]@univ-rennes.fr.
Many thanks to Guillaume Vernade for his help in making this website.
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