Projects

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How broad is the genetic basis of Vietnamese Musa species? Population genetics and phylogeography as a tool to locate interesting alleles against biotic and abiotic stresses KU Leuven

Rony Swennen
Division of Crop Biotechnics, Crop Biotechnics

In an era of globalization and climate change, it is important that novel and superior alleles are being identified and isolated from agricultural crops such as bananas since they hold the key to disease resistance and provide an important response to water deficit. As a result, the evolution of such alleles is of economic and agricultural importance and the identification of their population genetic structuring is crucial for future ...

Towards a strategy for the sustainable management of fragmented orchid populations: integrating ecology and population genetics. KU Leuven

Olivier Honnay
Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity Conservation
Habitat fragmentation is one of the most important threats to biodiversity. Plant populations are confined to very small habitat fragments in ahostile landscape matrix resulting in small population sizes. Orchids are very environmentally demanding, making them extremely vulnerable to even small changes in land use and the consequences of habitat fragmentation. Orchid species often depend on a specific pollinating genus for pollination, which ...

Population and landscape genetics in the water flea Daphnia KU Leuven

Luc De Meester
Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity Conservation

Summary

The population genetic structure of natural populations in landscapes is the result of a complex interaction between ecological and evolutionary processes such as gene flow, genetic drift and selection, which in turn are shaped by landscape characteristics (environmental gradients and geography), historical processes, or their combined effects. Understanding the relative role of these processes is fundamental to improve our ...

Conservation biology of fragmented wild orchid populations: integrating genetics and ecology in a spatial context. KU Leuven

Olivier Honnay
Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity Conservation
At present, many of the research regarding the consequences of habitat fragmentation for plant species in general, and for orchids in particular, lacks an integrated, multidisciplinary approach which hampers the identification of the diverse, often antagonistic, processes and feed-back loops that affect the survival of small and isolated plant populations. Here, we propose to integrate demographic modelling, population genetics and pollination ...

Population-based next generation sequencing to elucidate the complex genetics of Alzheimer dementia. University of Antwerp

Kristel Sleegers
VIB CMN - Neurodegenerative Brain Diseases Group
Alzheimer dementia (AD) is a very common, incurable disease. Because of changing demographics, the prevalence of AD increases rapidly. Recently, nine novel genes were identified that contribute to the risk to develop AD, and due to large scale international collaborations, several more are in the pipeline. This PhD project aims to identify the genetic polymorphisms in these genes that cause the increase in AD risk. To this end, next generation ...

Population genetic structure and cryptic diversity in free-living marine nematodes: descritpion and implications for population and ecosystem functioning Ghent University

Tom Moens
Department of Biology

This projects investigates the population genetic structure and cryptic diversity of selected free-living marine neamtode species using a combined molecular - morphological - morphometric approach. In addition, functional implications of genotypic diversity within known morphospecies are experimentally studied. Finally, the relationship between genetic diversity and the fitness, resistance and resilience of nematode populations is empirically ...

Seascape genetics in support of sustainable fisheries management of flatfish KU Leuven

Filip Volckaert
Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity Conservation, Laboratory for Cytogenetics and Genome Research
In 1883, Thomas Huxley put forward that all the great sea fisheries areinexhaustible. This illustrates the classical notion that marine environments tend to be demographically open without any chance of complete extinction. Such belief was based on the wide distribution of many marine species with extensive larval and adult dispersal, and large population sizes, even after heavy exploitation. However, the classical view of inexhaustible ...