Wageningen Evolution and Ecology Seminars

A new monthly seminar series called Wageningen Evolution and Ecology Seminars (WEES) will start on Thursday 22 October 2009. The first seminar will be by Tal Dagan titled 'Modular networks and cumulative impact of lateral gene transfer in prokaryote genome evolution'. The seminar will start at 16:00, Lecture room C7, Chemistry building, Dreijenplein 4 in Wageningen and will be followed by drinks. For more information go to http://www.gen.wur.nl/UK/WEES/

WEES is an initiative of PhD and postdocs at Wageningen UR. The aim of the series is to organize a continuing series of stimulating lectures on contemporary topics in evolution and ecology that are of interest to a broad audience. For this series we invite internationally renowned researchers that have leading roles in their field.

Prior to the seminar a Master Class is organized from 13:30 to 15:00 in C3, Mathematics building, Dreijenlaan 4. After the seminar, Tal Dagan is invited for dinner, and you are welcome to join.

The Master Class is organized for interested PhD and MSc students. In the Master Class the attendants have the possibility to meet the speaker of the seminar and have a discussion based on recent papers suggested by the speaker. The Master classes are a good possibility to get acquainted with hot topics in ecology and evolutionary biology and to learn to discuss these topics with leading scientists in the field. MSc students from Wageningen University can get credits for the Master Class.

Tal Dagan is a Post-doc at the Institut für Botanik III of the Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf, where she works in the group of Prof. dr. William Martin. She did her PhD on the evolution of genome composition in vertebrates at the University of Tel-Aviv. Her work now focuses on how genes in a genome have come to be where they are now. Most current thinking about evolution is based on the concept of trees, what is plausible for many higher organisms, but the tree concept does not work for organisms in which lateral gene transfer is important. For microbial organisms evolutionary relationships can be better described by networks rather than trees.

To register for the Master Class, contact Detmer Sipkema: detmer.sipkema@wur.nl