Using Evolutionary Perspectives to Inform Molecular Biology and Medicine, and Molecular Biology to Elucidate Evolutionary History and Mechanisms

Our goal is to use evolutionary perspectives to inform molecular biology and medicine, and molecular biology to elucidate evolutionary history and mechanisms. We hope to unite what have been disparate fields, population genetics and mechanistic molecular genetics, genomics and molecular biology, focusing on the impacts of the latter to our understanding of evolutionary processes. The meeting sessions will address a wide range of topics, including discussions of the constraints that cell biology and stochasticity pose for evolutionary processes, non-traditional mechanisms of inheritance, insights garnered from evolution experiments in the laboratory, mechanisms of coding and regulatory evolution highlighting the unexpected plasticity of genomes. We will discuss how our mechanistic knowledge could be used to predict and arrest evolutionary processes in infectious diseases and cancer.

The "modern synthesis" of the early twentieth century predated the molecular biology revolution and the genomics era. Although many of the assumptions and predictions of traditional population genetics have proven correct using these newfangled tools, others have to be modified due to new discoveries such as non-genetic, protein and RNA-based inheritance and stress-inducible mutations. Likewise, researchers in the fields of molecular biology, genomics, and medicine are often unacquainted with population genetics theory and overlook the critical role of evolutionary processes in all of life. This meeting is aimed at the growing numbers of investigators attempting to unite these formerly disparate fields and to learn from one another. A thoughtful and informed integration of these disciplines is crucial for understanding biology and successfully combating a host of human diseases and the consequences of a rapidly warming planet. This meeting aims to provide a home and community for researchers involved in this ongoing, cross-disciplinary endeavor.