Welcome to the Insect Evolutionary Genomics lab at the University of Münster!

Our work primarily aims at understanding the function and evolution of genomic complexity, currently focusing on advancing our understanding of how structural and compositional differences between genomes arise, how these differences become evident at the phenotypic level, and how selection and drift eventually produce evolutionary change. For this, we study genome evolutionary mechanisms at the level of species, populations and families to get a complete picture of the molecular and genetic mechanisms that allow adaptive evolution and differentiation at the level of the genome.

We approach these mechanisms from two different directions.
We either begin from an organismal perspective, focusing on adaptive traits that emerged within a group of populations or species – for example the convergent evolution of inquiline social parasitism in fungus-growing ants. To unravel the underlying evolutionary processes, we then study phenotypic (e.g. behavioral, morphological, transcriptomic) and genetic/genomic changes underlying the adaptive change. Eventually, we aim to develop model based on our understanding of genome evolutionary and population genetic mechanisms that explain how the adaptation could arise and be favored by selection.

Alternatively, we study evolutionary mechanisms in a suitable system, so far focusing on mechanisms of rapid adaptive change, e.g. via transposable elements (TEs), phenotypic plasticity and epigenetic inheritance, or genome rearrangements. The latter approach usually involves the selection of suitable model organisms that can be kept under laboratory conditions over several generations (i.e. the ant Cardiocondyla obscurior and the parasitoid was Aphidius ervi).

Our toolkit is clearly biased towards big data analyses, in particular approaches from the fields of comparative genomics, population genomics, and transcriptomics. However, our projects commonly also involve field work (either for sample collection or to study the organism) and behavioral or molecular experiments in the laboratory to support findings from big data analyses.

Most of our research has so far focused on ants, while only a minority of my ongoing projects and collaborations focus on honey bees and parasitoid wasps. We study species so rare that they are almost impossible to collect and study under laboratory conditions (inquiline social parasites in Acromyrmex) or species that are very well suited to be kept under artificial conditions in large laboratory populations (e.g. C. obscurior and A. ervi).