Scott Edwards
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USAScott Edwards is an evolutionary biologist who focuses on genomic approaches to bird evolution. He started his career as a field biologist and museum scientists, and he is constantly addressing the challenge of adapting modern technologies to the study of unwieldy subjects – wild bird species in their natural environments. His dissertation research focused on the population genetics and biogeography of social songbirds in Australia, a topic that he continues to study with his students today. As a postdoctoral fellow he undertook studies of a fascinating and rapidly evolving set of genes of the immune system of birds, the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), to understand ways in which genetic variation can have functional consequences for fitness and resistance to disease. His interest in the genome and chromosomes of birds has extended his search for bird origins into the depths of the phylogenetic tree for reptiles, and he has generated genomic resources useful for studying the large-scale structure of genomes of alligators, turtles, and other ancestors of birds. The topic of his presentation, on the evolutionary genomics of disease spread in House Finches, a common North American songbird, represents a final project that allows him to study birds in the field and then return to the lab to study their genes and genetic variation.
ABSTRACTGenomics of hosts and parasites:
co-evolutionary cross-talk between birds, genes, and bacteria
When Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he could not appreciate the remarkable arms races between interacting hosts, parasites and genes during a disease outbreak. We have been studying the evolutionary dynamics of a recent interaction between a common North American songbird, the house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus), and a bacterium (Mycoplasma gallisepticum) that recently invaded house finch populations. Modern genomics approaches can monitor the level of expression of genes as the host is infected with this novel parasite, and to understand how plumage and prior exposure influence this expression. By sequencing the entire genome of the bacterium, and studying its evolution during different time points during the disease outbreak, we are also able to study the accumulation of evolutionary changes accompanying adaptation to its new host. Modern genomics allows us to study both sides of this co-evolutionary interaction in ways Darwin probably never imagined.
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