The genetic architecture of reproductive isolation

Climate change is rapidly affecting the natural world and will undoubtedly affect biodiversity, but biologists know very little about the effects of climate change on the development of new species. In this project, I will use mathematical models and comp uter simulations to study the effects of climate change on the development of reproductive isolation. The Bateson-Dobzhansky-Muller model of speciation predicts that post-zygotic isolation evolves due to the accumulation of incompatible epistatic interact ions but few studies have quantified the relationship between genetic architecture and patterns of divergence. Directional epistasis has been shown to be important in responses to selection and the evolution of genetic architecture, and in this project I will examine how the direction and magnitude of epistatic interactions influence the evolution of hybrid incompatibilities under different patterns of climate change. This work will be in collaboration with Thomas Hansen, a faculty member at the Universit y of Oslo Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), and Gunter Wagner (Yale University) and David Houle (Florida State University), who will be visiting CEES for the duration of this fellowship.