Research
In plants the gametes come from a separate life stage called gametophyte. Plants alternate their lifecycles between the gametophytes (n) and the sporophytes (2n). These two life stages are adapted to different environments.
In flowering plants, gametophytes include ovule and pollen, they are smaller, have simpler structure and are dependent on the diploid sporophytes. Most evolutionary studies in flowering plants focus on the sporophytes, selection on the gametophyte stage is under-investigated.
Currently I’m studying how selection in plant gametophytes affect the evolution of both phases of the lifecycle using a combination of population genomics, association mapping studies and experimental crosses. I’m interested in the following questions:
- Is there population genomic signal of antagonistic pleiotropy across life stages?
- Does standing variation in gene expression have differential effects across life stages?
- What are characteristics of genetic variation for pollen competition?
Publications
Check out my google scholar profile here.
Hibbins MS, Rifkin JL, Choudhury BI, Voznesenka O, Sacchi BM, Yuan M, Gong Y, Barrett SC, Wright SI. Phylogenomics resolves key relationships in Rumex and uncovers a dynamic history of independently evolving sex chromosomes. bioRxiv. 2023:2023-12.
Rifkin JL, Hnatovska S, Yuan M, Sacchi BM, Choudhury BI, Gong Y, Rastas P, Barrett SC, Wright SI. 2022. Recombination landscape dimorphism and sex chromosome evolution in the dioecious plant Rumex hastatulus. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 377(1850):20210226.
Yuan M, Stinchcombe JR. 2020. Population genomics of parallel adaptation. Mol Ecol. 29(21): 4033-4036.
Zhang Z, Dong H, Yuan M, Yu Y. 2020. The complete chloroplast genome of Oenanthe javanica. Mitochondrial DNA Part B. 5(3):3151-3153.