Format: ORAL

Yann Bourgeois1

1 Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Montpellier, France

Quantifying the factors that drive the accumulation of genetic variation in genomes is essential to understand the rules of life and has widespread applications in agronomy and conservation. However, our understanding of the determinants of genetic diversity is still strongly biased towards the study of point mutations such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). More must be done to understand the evolutionary dynamics of structural variation. A common type of such variation includes transposable elements (TEs). These elements are among the most variable genomic features across the living world, and can have a dramatic effect on their hosts fitness. In this presentation, I will introduce some of the most recent advances in our understanding of TEs, adopting a population genetics perspective. I will show how combining information about TEs and flanking SNPs may help addressing key questions, such as the distribution of TEs fitness effects. I will illustrate the interest of such approaches by applying some of these methods to the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera), a keystone species of oasis agrosystems particularly adapted to arid environments, in which recently active TEs account for ~3% of the ~850Mb genome, making them promising candidates to study the bases of (mal)adaptation.