Every day, whether I go walking in a garden or have a look at my plate, I am impressed by the incredible diversity of life on Earth. Biological diversity, recently named"Biodiversity", is a multiplicity of species but also shapes, colours, characters, and at a larger scale, a large variety of environments, with their own community of species.
My research interests are part of this general aim to understand the evolution of biodiversity on several timescales and at different levels. Actual diversity is the result of millions of years of evolution... And it can change and be altered very suddenly, for example due to human activities. I aim to better understand the evolutionary processes that shape the diversity of species, traits and genomes. Reciprocally, I also ask how does the genomic architecture or some adaptive traits contribute to the evolution of diversity.
Studying evolution requires the integration of several approaches and I like 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 me at claire.merot[@]univ-rennes1.fr
Species evolution and adaptation has been suggested to be enhanced by certain genomic structures. One of these are inversions, where a segment of the chromosome breaks, is reversed and then re-inserted. The most compelling aspects of inversions is reduced recombination due to a decrease in synapsis formation in heterozygotes. As a result, inversions accumulate more variation than collinear regions and show intriguing patterns, such as varying in frequency along ecological clines, being involved in hybrid vigour, and harbouring an overabundance of loci involved in adaptation, population divergence and speciation.
An important axis of research thus addresses the role of inversions in adaptation by means of a multi-layer integrative approach using the seaweed fly Coelopa frigida as a model species. By combining the population ecology, genomics and laboratory experiments, I investigate the association between inversions and adaptation to heterogeneous environments. I am also explicitely testing fitness in the lab and investigating functionally the genetic basis of local adaptation.
My aim is to shed light on the modalities by which chromosomic inversions contribute to adaptation in a non-model species and the selective forces and genetic mechanisms underlying the evolution of such structures.
More broadly, I am interested in improving our understanding of the importance of structural variants of the genome in Evolution. Structural variants are changes in the presence, position or direction of a genomic sequence.
We recently realised how widespread and consequent they can be in all species. Although we now have the means to study structural variants, particularly wiht long-reads, we are far from knowing their variability, and how such structural polymorphism is distributed accross populations or species.
In particular, I am interested in developping methods and projects on various species to get a broader knowledge of the relevance of Sv for the evolution fo biological diversity.
My research focused on a big chromosomal inversion affecting multiple traits (sometimes called supergene) in the seaweed fly Coelopa frigida . By studying the population ecology, genomics and inversion frequencies in natural populations we investigated the implication of this inversion in local adaptation.
Then, using laboratory experiments, we explicitely tested fitness and modelled the different mechanisms of balancing selection that maintained the inversion polymorphism.
Recent radiations, such as the mimetic radiation of Heliconius butterflies in the Neotropics, offer an excellent example to address the evolutionary processes involved in speciation with gene flow. During my thesis, I explored an interesting situation in the Heliconius clade: two sibling species that are co-mimics of each other, sharing a similar wing colour pattern. This offers the possibility to study the limits of the classical model of speciation associated with shifts in wing pattern, usually described in this group. Colour pattern divergence indeed triggers strong reproductive isolation through disruptive natural selection for Müllerian mimicry and through sexual selection and assortative mating. I investigated how Müllerian mimicry affects species differentiation and reproductive isolation.
Specifically, I explored genetic divergence, coexistence, mimetic relationship and isolating barriers between the co-mimics H. timareta thelxinoe and H. melpomene amaryllis. I showed that the two species maintain consistent genetic and phenotypic divergence while hybridizing at low frequency. They display close resemblance in colour pattern, whose accuracy is affected by the composition of local mimetic community. Through controlled crosses, I showed that hybrids are intermediate in wing pattern and shape, suggesting that predation does not trigger strong post-mating isolation. However, behavioural sexual pre-mating isolation is high due to mate choice, likely relying on chemical cues.
Overall, my results confirmed that Müllerian mimicry between closely-related species likely enhances gene flow and acts against species differentiation. Nevertheless, this effect is balanced by the multidimensionality of isolating barriers, triggered by other ecological factors driving divergence.
For more details, I invit you to contact me or to consult my communications and publications
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