Marker Lectures in Evolutionary Biology Scheduled for 13 and 14 November

7 November 2006 —Daniel L. Hartl, the Higgins Professor of Biology at Harvard University, will present the 2006 Marker Lectures in Evolutionary Biology on 13 and 14 November 2006 at the Penn State University Park campus. The free public lectures are sponsored by the Department of Biology and the Eberly College of Science.

The series includes a lecture intended for a general audience, titled “Overwhelming Odds Against the Less Fit: Evidence for Positive Selection in Protein Evolution,” at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, 13 November 2006, in 104 Keller Building. Hartl will discuss some possible reasons why many amino-acid replacements appear to be driven by weak positive selection. “Analysis of DNA sequence variation within and between species confirms that many amino acid polymorphisms are deleterious,” he explains, “but some harmful polymorphisms may become fixed in the genetic sequence.”

Hartl also will give a more specialized lecture at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 14 November 2006, in the HUB Auditorium, room 117 of the HUB-Robeson Center, titled “Transcriptional Variation and Plasticity in the Yeast Genome.” Although a great deal is known about the laboratory yeast S. cerevisiae and its response to environmental changes, Hartl says “relatively little is known about either transcriptional plasticity or the genotype-by-environment interaction (GEI) for transcriptional plasticity among genetically diverse yeasts isolated in nature.” Hartl will present evidence that the structure responsible for a wide variety of physiological effects is in a gene that encodes a major sensor of the external nutritional environment.

Hartl has been honored with the Samuel Weiner Outstanding Scholar Award and Medal and the Anton Dohrn Medal of the Stazione Zoologica in Italy. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also was previously president of the Genetics Society of America and the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Hartl received his doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California in Berkeley. He has been on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Purdue University, and Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. In addition to more than 300 scientific articles, he has authored or coauthored 24 books.

The Marker Lectures were established in 1984 through a gift from the late Russell Marker, professor emeritus of organic chemistry at Penn State, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies, including the birth-control pill. The Marker endowment allows the Penn State Eberly College of Science to present annual Marker Lectures in astronomy and astrophysics, the chemical sciences, evolutionary biology, genetic engineering, the mathematical sciences, and physics.

For additional information, contact the Department of Biology at 814-863-0278, or Professor Masatoshi Nei by telephone at 814-863-7334 or by email at: nxm2@psu.edu.

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