Rennison Lab
Principal Investigator: Diana Jessie Rennison
Institution: University of California San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Work over the last decade has provided tantalizing clues that the genetic mechanisms that underlie evolutionary trajectories may be more constrained and deterministic than previously appreciated. Whether the genetic basis of evolution is predictable or stochastic is a fundamental question in evolutionary biology, and the ability to predict evolutionary responses has critical implications for the fields of agriculture, medicine and conservation. Unfortunately, we are far from understanding the factors that underlie the predictability of evolutionary responses or the fitness consequences associated with alternative evolutionary trajectories in nature. Surveys of replicate populations adapting to the same environmental conditions provide an opportunity to quantify the repeatability of evolutionary trajectories and determine the factors affecting observed patterns of variation. Several genetic factors are hypothesized to affect the probability of a gene or mutation’s use during the process of adaptation. However, to date there have been few empirical tests determining the contribution of individual factors to patterns of gene re-use (parallelism) in natural populations. In the proposed…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM151058-04: Understanding predictability of evolutionary trajectories (2026)
- 5R35GM151058-03: Understanding predictability of evolutionary trajectories (2025)
- 5R35GM151058-02: Understanding predictability of evolutionary trajectories (2024)
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