AIMRC Seminar: Mitochondrial-Nuclear Fitness Interactions in Evolution and Disease

The Arkansas Integrative Metabolic Research Center will host David Rand, a professor of natural history at Brown University, at 12:55 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 25, in CHEM 0144. In this talk, Rand explains how studying mitochondria — the cell's energy producers — offers a useful way to understand complex gene-by-gene (GxG) or gene-by-environment (GxE) interactions, since mitochondria rely on close cooperation between a small set of genes in mitochondrial DNA and many genes in the cell's main DNA. Using studies in fruit flies (Drosophila), he shows that interactions between these two gene systems strongly influence energy-intensive traits and gene activity, helping explain how gene-gene and gene-environment interactions work.

Abstract: Phenotypic variation in most organisms, including humans, is highly complex and is caused by thousands of genetic variants of small individual effect, and little is known about the role of gene-by-gene (GxG) or gene-by-environment (GxE) interactions influencing this variation. In this talk, Rand will discuss recent work on the genetics of mitochondria as a novel model in the context of this complex trait problem. The mitonuclear genome requires coordinated expression of 37 genes in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and more than 1,000 genes in the nuclear genome, making it a model subset of genomic interactions in all animals. Rand will summarize previous and unpublished work using Drosophila to dissect the joint contribution of mtDNA- and nuclear-encoded genes to metabolically demanding traits and gene expression and proposes that mitonuclear interactions are key components of the mechanisms underlying GxG and GxE interactions.

Biography: Rand joined the Brown faculty in 1991 after receiving a B.A. at Harvard and a Ph.D. in biology at Yale, and postdoctoral training in population genetics at Harvard. He is the Stephen T. Olney Professor of Natural History in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, where he is chair of the department. He teaches undergraduate courses in evolutionary biology, evolutionary genetics and graduate seminars on ecological, evolutionary and population genetics. His research focuses on the coevolution of nuclear and mitochondrial genomes; the role of mitochondrial mutations in fitness, aging and disease; and the environmental genomics of adaptation in marine organisms, with funding from the NIH and NSF. He was the principal investigator of an NSF IGERT Training Grant in Reverse Ecology, bridging graduate programs in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Applied Math, and the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole. He is currently the principal investigator of an NIH COBRE award focusing on the computational biology of human disease. He is a past president of the American Genetic Association and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

This event is supported by NIGMS of the National Institutes of Health under award number P20GM139768. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Pizza and beverages will be served. Please contact Kimberley Fuller, fullerk@uark.edu, for more information.

For those unable to attend in person, this seminar will also be available via Zoom.