KLI Colloquia are informal, public talks that are followed by extensive dissussions. Speakers are KLI fellows or visiting researchers who are interested in presenting their work to an interdisciplinary audience and discussing it in a wider research context. We offer three types of talks:
1. Current Research Talks. KLI fellows or visiting researchers present and discuss their most recent research with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
2. Future Research Talks. Visiting researchers present and discuss future projects and ideas togehter with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
3. Professional Developmental Talks. Experts about research grants and applications at the Austrian and European levels present career opportunities and strategies to late-PhD and post-doctoral researchers.
- The presentation language is English.
- If you are interested in presenting your current or future work at the KLI, please contact the Scientific Director or the Executive Manager.
Event Details
Topic description:
While adaptations to novel environments extend over evolutionary timescales, a new environment can emerge already within a single generation and can immediately impact the physiological and epigenetic state of the organism. Whether and how the initial response might be connected to longer-term establishment of new adaptations are not clear. We address these questions experimentally by studying how flies cope with novel scenarios of stress. We identified epigenetic- and symbiotic-mediated mechanisms which promote increased developmental plasticity under stress, influence the germline, and contribute to non-Mendelian transfer of variation across generations. I will discuss these epigenetic- and symbiotic-mediated processes and their potential contribution to the establishment of initial adaptations that can bridge part of the gap between ecological and evolutionary processes.
Biographical note:
Yoav Soen is a biophysicist interested in how robust organisms can be sufficiently plastic to cope with new problems. Yoav was formally trained in Electrical Engineering and Physics (Technion, Israel Institute of Technology). After graduating, he got interested in Life Sciences and conducted a postdoctoral research with Patrick Brown at Stanford University, Dept. of Biochemistry (2001-2006). On 2006, Yoav established a research lab in the Weizmann Institute of Science, Department of Biological Chemistry. His group takes an experimental approach for studying how developing flies cope with unfamiliar scenarios of stress, the underlying epigenetic and symbiotic mechanisms of response, the trans-generational implications of these events and how they may bridge ecological and evolutionary processes.
