Maud Tenaillon

Biography

 Her research focus on understanding how the evolutionary forces shape the genetic variation of plant genomes in relation with adaptation.  At the genome level, domestication involved a loss of diversity resulting from both a bottleneck and selection at target genes. During her PhD, she have been working on depicting this process in a selfer plant, the foxtail millet, adressing questions such as: What are the genetic basis of domestication? Is there an influence of the breeding system on the organization of domesticated genes? Since then she have been focusing on maize as a model species. she investigated the influence of recombination and selection in shaping patterns of nucleotide and microsatellite diversity in this species. She worked both: at a small scale in between two loci, one has been subjected to strong selection during domestication and the other has been involved in climate adaptation; and at a broader scale considering multiple loci. In particular, she developed a multilocus modelto investigate the impact of demography (domestication bottleneck) on diversity and long distance linkage disequilibrium. This model was applied in a large dataset to identify loci under selection in maize. Because increase in starch content is considered as a major domestication trait, She studied the evolution of multigene families encoding enzymes of the starch biosynthesis pathway. The aim was to characterize the forces that primarly determine the fate of duplicated genes, and to describe the patterns of expression and variability of these duplicates in maize and its wild progenitors - the teosintes. She worked on questions related to genome size variation within and among species in the Zea genus, both from a genomic - Transposable Element (TE) content - and an ecological perspective.  

Research Interest

 She is currently working on three main projects. The first project concerns the characterization of European maize, its demographic and adaptive history linked to recent introduction(s) at the end of the 15th century. She has generated whole-genome sequencing (WGS) of 67 maize genomes. The second project aims at investigating the genetic bases of local adaptation in teosinte populations along altitudinal gradients with a special emphasis on TEs. The focus of the third project is the study of the maize floral transition network. A main objective is to identify the (epi)mutations involved in an experimental evolution setting in which divergent selection for flowering time has been applied for over 20 generations.