10th September 2025 | 13:00 – 14:00 BST
The Advanced Plant Growth Centre (APGC) is excited to announce the next seminar in its 2025 series, presented by Dr Matthias Benoit, LIPME Laboratory
Summary
This talk will explore how gene duplication and paralogue divergence shape the evolutionary landscape of crop genomes and complicate efforts in trait engineering. Drawing on a recent pan-genomic study across 22 Solanum species, including tomato and its relatives, we reveal how variation in gene copy number and function- exemplified by the fruit size regulator CLV3—creates unforeseen genetic dependencies. The findings highlight how paralogue diversification, even over short evolutionary timescales, can obscure genotype-to-phenotype relationships and limit the predictability of genetic interventions. Understanding and leveraging this hidden layer of diversity will be crucial for more precise and effective crop improvement.
About the Speaker
Matthias Benoit is a principal investigator at INRAE within the LIPME laboratory in Toulouse, France. His research focuses on how genetic and epigenetic mechanisms shape plant development and environmental responses. He is particularly interested in the roles of gene duplication, transposable elements, and regulatory innovation in the emergence of new traits and the diversification of gene function. Matthias earned his PhD in molecular genetics from GReD in Clermont-Ferrand (France), followed by postdoctoral research at the Sainsbury Laboratory (UK) and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (USA), where he studied epigenomic variation and structural genome evolution in crop species.
