Gabe DuBose

Evolutionary Patterns and Processes Research

Evolution and Ontogeny

I have primairly approached my work on life cycle evolution from an evolutionary genetics perspective. Theory suggests one of the primary determinants of how selection and drift shape the fate of a genetic variation is ontogenetic/life cycle dynamics. Genes that are expressed across a broad range of life stages should be more evolutionairly constraind by purifying selection. For example, a mutation that could in theory be beneficial to larval performance would not be selected if it also had negative impacts on adult performance. Likewise, genes that are more specific to certain life stages should be more free to evolutionairly diverge. Therefore, my work has focused on understanding the genetic basis of decoupling between life stages and how this facilitates their differentiation. However, I am also interested in exploring ecological pressures that favor the evolution of differentiation between life stages as well.

Evolution and plasticity

Explaining the evolution and differentiation of plastic phenotypes is challenging because purifying seleciton that would remove deleterious mutations only acts in the portion of the population that expresses said phenotype. Therefore, mutation and drift allow for the accumulation of deleteirous variation, which should decrease the fitness assocaited with plastic phenotypes over time. However, plastic phenotypes are ubiquitous in nature, and one of my focuses is to further our understanding of this phenomeon. To this end, I combine experimental evolution and mathematical/computational modeling to study the factors that promote the evolutionary maintenance and differentiation of plastic phenotypes.

Evolution of endosymbioses

Endosymbiotic interactions have played transformative roles in the evolution of hosts from across the tree of life. The most notable examples of this are mitochondria and chloroplast, but evolutionairly important endosymbioses have independently arisen across diverse taxa. Therefore, it seems that major evolutionary trajectories can be largely shaped by endosymbiotic interactions. My work has primairly focused on understanding how ecological processes shape the frequency of endosymbionts that are still segregating in host populations, with the objective of understanding how the said ecological processes influence the evolutionary trajectories of endosymbiotic interacitons.