Community Event | Café Scientifique with Kirsten Bomblies

Genome duplication, where every chromosome in an organism is duplicated, is a dramatic event for an organism - a sort of macromutation. Genome duplicated organisms are called polyploids, and these generally boast novelties, such as increased stress resilience, and often larger fruits, that make them appealing tools in crop improvement. They have also played important roles in natural evolution. But both for understanding the role of polyploidy in evolution and for possibly utilising polyploidy as a tool in crop improvement, we run squarely into the barrier that neopolyploids often have low fertility. What exactly limits the fertility of polyploids, and how evolution can overcome these challenges are the main questions Prof. Bomblies lab works on. During her talk, she will focus on two aspects: (1) How polyploid plants can evolve to sort the additional chromosome copies they carry during gamete production (and why this is challenging in the first place). (2) Another, possibly even more significant challenge to fertility that they discovered by understanding first what genes natural selection targeted in polyploid adaptation, and how the evolved polyploids solved the problem.

Kirsten Bomblies is a scientist originally from the US. She is a professor at the ETH in Zürich in plant evolutionary genetics. She grew up in rural Colorado, and received her Bachelor’s in Biochemistry and Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1996. She worked three years in San Diego as a research assistant, before going on to do her PhD in Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, which she received in 2004. Thereafter she went to Teubingen, Germany, for a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, working with Detlef Weigel. She started her own group, at Harvard University, in 2009, and has been at ETH since 2019. In 2008, she won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. In her free time, she loves climbing, hiking, cycling, kayaking and reading.

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