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 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, one supported by an ERC Starting grant which aims to address the role of structural variants in eco-evolutionary processes. Other ongoing projects more specifically study polymorphic supergenes involved in adaptation to heterogenous environments in seaweed flies at micro and macro-evolutionary level in collaboration with Sweden, Canada, USA and New Zealand. You can find more details about our research on the research page and about our little group on the people page
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.
If you are interested in doing a post-doc, PhD or internship with me, please contact claire.merot[@]univ-rennes.fr
Please follow the links for our publications or my github page.
You can contact me by e-mail at [first name].[surname]@univ-rennes1.fr.
Many thanks to Guillaume Vernade for his help in making this website.
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