- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The event takes place from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall. Meredith Cezner, graduate student in the Louie Yang lab, is the host and will introduce him. Matute researches the genetics, behavior, and ecological context of reproductive isolation in the genus Drosophila.
His abstract: "Gene flow between species has been thought to oppose the divergence process, but there has been no systematic treatment of how species persist in the face of gene flow in secondary contact. Furthermore, while hybridization is known to generate new species in plants and fungi, it is not known how prevalent is the creative role of hybridization is in animal speciation. An approach to address the relative importance of hybrid speciation is experimental evolution. Our results test the possibility of hybrid speciation at different phylogenetic scales as a formal test of the likelihood of hybrid speciation. This project constitutes the first experimental approach to test the possible role of hybridization in generating new animal species."
Much of Matute's work examines the interactions between island endemics and cosmopolitan species in the Seychelles archipelago, where natural zones of secondary contact allow for the study of hybridization and reproductive isolation in the field. He received this year's Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, an award recognizing “the accomplishments and future promise of an outstanding young evolutionary biologist."
Matute obtained a dual degree in biology and microbiology at Universidad de Los Andes in Columbia in 2005. He completed his doctorate in ecology and evolution with Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2010.
One of his research papers, "Macroevolutionary Speciation Rates are Decoupled from the Evolution of Intrinsic Reproductive Isolation in Drosophila and Birds," was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The abstract:
"The rate at which speciation occurs varies greatly among different kinds of organisms and is frequently assumed to result from species- or clade-specific factors that influence the rate at which populations acquire reproductive isolation. This premise leads to a fundamental prediction that has never been tested: Organisms that quickly evolve prezygotic or postzygotic reproductive isolation should have faster rates of speciation than organisms that slowly acquire reproductive isolation. We combined phylogenetic estimates of speciation rates from Drosophila and birds with a method for analyzing interspecific hybridization data to test whether the rate at which individual lineages evolve reproductive isolation predicts their macroevolutionary rate of species formation. We find that some lineages evolve reproductive isolation much more quickly than others, but this variation is decoupled from rates of speciation as measured on phylogenetic trees. For the clades examined here, reproductive isolation—especially intrinsic, postzygotic isolation—does not seem to be the rate-limiting control on macroevolutionary diversification dynamics. These results suggest that factors associated with intrinsic reproductive isolation may have less to do with the tremendous variation in species diversity across the evolutionary tree of life than is generally assumed."
See more of his research publications.
The remainder of noon-hour seminars for the winter quarter:
Jan. 21
George Dimopoulous
Title of Seminar: "Exploiting Infection Bottlenecks in the Mosquito to Control Human Disease"
Director of the Parasitology Core Facility
John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Professor, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology
Baltimore, Md.
Nominator/host: Jiawen Xu, graduate student, Bruce Hammock lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Jan. 28
Michael Parrella
Title of Seminar: "To Antarctica and Back: The Search for Beligica antarctica (Diptera; Chironomidae)”
Professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Feb. 4
Jay Evans
Title of Seminar: "What's It Like Inside a Bee? Genetic Approaches to Honey Bee hHealth"
Research entomologist
USDA Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS)
Beltsville, MD.
Nominator/host: Marin County Beekeepers
Feb. 11
Amro Zayed
Title of Seminar: "Bee Genes, Behavior and Adaptation"
Professor, Department of Biology
York University
Toronto, Canada
Nominator/host: Brian Johnson, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Feb. 18
Steven Frank
Title of Seminar: "Can Forests Take the Heat? Managing Pests and Ecosystem Services in a Warming Climate"
Assistant Professor, Department of Biology
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, N.C.
Nominator/host: Michael Parrella, professor and chair, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
March 4
Brian Wiegmann
Executive Director of Genome Research Laboratory
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, N.C.
Nominator/host:Steve Nadler, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
March 11
Thomas Eltz
Title of Seminar: "Perfume Making and Signalling in Orchid bees: New Light on an Old Enigma"
Chemical Ecologist
University of Bochum
Bochum, Germany
Nominator/host: Santiago Ramirez, faculty member, UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology
Coodinating the seminars is Professor Steve Nadler at sanadler@ucdavis.edu.