Genomics of rapid adaptation in the lab and in the wild

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Project Summary Adaptation is the foundational concept in biology. My lab aims to build an empirically and theoretically rich theory of adaptation. We focus specifically on the inference of adaptation from genomic data and on the study of rapid evolution in real time. The latter include (i) experimental evolution in yeast (adaptation by de novo mutation in well-mixed clonal system), (ii) adaptation on seasonal and ecological time-scales in Drosophila (adaptation from standing variation in a obligately sexual organism), and (iii) tumor initiation, growth, and evolution in experimental mouse model of lung cancer (engineered de novo and spontaneous alterations in a spatially constrained context). These projects utilize a diversity of systems, high throughput and well-powered experimental modalities, and sophisticated and varied analytic frameworks, but they all focus on the overarching need to understand the dynamics of rapid adaptation. Ultimately, we aim to construct a theory of evolutionary adaptation that can naturally account for the patterns of evolution established over long periods of time, which are evident in genomic data, as well as the short-term dynamics of adaptation directly observable in short-term experimental studies of evolution.