Research

The various kinds of research done in my lab all use different levels of organisation to answer questions of evolutionary biology. My current work is focused on the evolutionary aspects linked to polyploidy in caldocerans. We examine the effects of chromosome duplication on the physiology and ecology of freshwater invertebrates. Thanks to genome sequencing of the water flea, Daphnia pulex, we have new tools to characterize genomes. Additionally, we are interested in genes that control the body size of the daphnia. This characteristic is crucial to evolutionary biology because it is linked to reproductive fitness and curiously, we do not know much about the genes that control it. I am also interested in the factors linked to the origin and maintenance of asexuality. Why do asexual organisms show a different geographical distribution than their asexual ancestors? Certain daphnia clones find themselves in pristine arctic environments and are used to test the different evolutionary hypotheses. The approaches that I use in my lab are to answer these questions using a combination of molecular techniques, metabolic measures as well as experiments.