Kimberly Hughes
Florida State University, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Why can some populations adapt when their environment changes while others cannot? Part of the answer lies in genotype-by-environment interaction (GxE), the way different genetic backgrounds respond differently to the same conditions.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Genetics
Biology
- Topics
genotype-by-environment interaction
GxE
phenotypic plasticity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test how a fruit fly's preference for an environment and its experience in it combine to produce patterns of plasticity and fitness, and which individuals become plastic.
- Identify gene expression networks in fruit flies that drive behavioral variation and connect environment choice to plasticity.
- Build population-genetic models of how variation in environmental exposure shapes genetic variation in responses, predicting GxE and its evolution within and across generations.
More about the research
Individuals also choose where to live, and the environments they choose then shape how they develop. That link may distort how GxE is measured and how it evolves. This collaborative project studies how environment choice and development are connected, working upward from individuals to populations.
Why it matters
Predicting whether populations have the genetic variation to cope with environmental change is a central problem in biology. Bottom-up models that link environment choice, development and genetics could help researchers judge which populations are vulnerable to change. The work offers a general framework that can be applied to any organism.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Julia Saltz
Indiana University, IN·Ecology & Evolution
Test how fruit flies' preference for a particular environment relates to their experience in that environment, and how both shape individual patterns of plasticity and fitness.
Kerry Geiler-Samerotte
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Evolve thousands of DNA-barcoded yeast lineages across subtly different temperatures to measure how the genetic basis of adaptation and the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) shift along the gradient.
Melissa Lehti-Shiu
Michigan State University, MI·Plant Science & Agriculture
Measure genetic interactions between 150–200 pairs of Arabidopsis protein kinase genes by phenotyping single and double mutants under 3–5 temperature regimes, using AI-based trait measurement.
The school
Florida State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $461M a year on research, 481 research doctorates a year.
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