Evolutionary Ecology - EE
Local adaptation in Drosophila

Pedro Miguel Moraes Corado Simões

Researcher

Climate change Biogeographical differentiation Experimental evolution Predictability of evolution Genome-wide evolution Evolution of chromosomal inversions

I am currently a Researcher at Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, working in the team ‘Local Adaptation in Drosophila’ - headed by Prof. Margarida Matos - of the Evolutionary Ecology research group of cE3c. My main research focus at present is understanding the process of thermal adaptation. I am the Principal investigator of the FCT research project ADAPTCLIMWARM (https://ce3c.ciencias.ulisboa.pt/research/projects/ver.php?id=151), that is studying the real-time evolution of populations under a scenario of climate change. My research approach uses Drosophila as a model organism to address real-time evolution processes during adaptation to new thermal environments. In particular, we are analyzing how historically differentiated Drosophila subobscura populations adapt to increasingly warmer and variable environments (under controlled laboratory conditions). This project addresses different levels of biological organization such as the phenotype, karyotype and genotype.  

My current research is driven by four overarching objectives: 1) Understanding the patterns of adaptation to climate change at the phenotypic and molecular level; 2) Unraveling the genomic and transcriptomic changes that occur during adaptation to new environments; 3) Addressing the role of History and Selection and the impact of such forces on the repeatability of Adaptive Evolution at both the phenotypic and genomic levels; 4) Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms underlying clinal variation, namely of chromosomal inversions.

I currently collaborate with several colleagues working on Population and Evolutionary Genetics, Evolutionary Ecology and Experimental Evolution: in particular Mauro Santos (Univ. Autonoma Barcelona), Volker Loeschcke (Aarhus University), Marta Pascual (Univ Barcelona) and Celia Schunter (Univ of Hong Kong).