Max Planck Institutes and Experts

The micronutrient selenium is an essential part of the human diet. As humans migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago they came to settle in environments with vastly differing selenium levels. Researchers of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have found evidence that human populations who live in regions that provide insufficient dietary selenium show signals of adaptation in the genes that use or regulate selenium.

Autophagy is a recycling system of the cell that prevents all kinds of cellular waste from accumulating. Autophagy sequesters such material in specialized containers, which are like other organelles of the cell surrounded by a flexible membrane. These containers transport their contents to cellular recycling stations for degradation. The researchers recently identified a specialized set of proteins that stabilize autophagic containers. Similar to recycling bins, these proteins form a stiff shell on top of the membrane to provide physical support.

In spite of the great progress of the biosciences during the last decades, the very line of division between the animate and inanimate world still remains elusive. One of the most distinctive features of living systems is their compositional and organizational complexity, but how complex does life really have to be? Our research aims to identify a minimal set of fundamental features and governing principles of biological cells - being the smallest units of life - to enable their comprehensive biophysical, i.e., quantitative characterization by a defined set of parameters.

The basic features of the body organisation of adult plants are established during embryogenesis. This process starts from the fertilized egg cell (zygote), which divides into an apical embryonic cell and a basal extra-embryonic cell. How this initial difference originates with input from the YODA pathway is briefly discussed. These cells give rise to embryo and extra-embryonic suspensor, respectively. The embryonic cells then generate, in response to the plant hormone auxin, a signal that stimulates the adjacent extra-embryonic cell to initiate the formation of the embryonic root meristem.

We are surrounded by microorganisms that adapt in their struggle to persist. In contrast to animals or plants, such adaptations don't take thousands of years but sometimes happen within weeks. To understand such rapid evolution, we need new theoretical frameworks and direct observations of the evolutionary dynamics. The research group develops such theory and uses it to analyze sequence data from influenza and human immunodeficiency virus populations. The results provide insight into the properties of the evolutionary process and allow predicting the composition of future virus populations.