Adaptation of populations to new environments is frequently costly due to trade-offs between life history traits, and consequently, parasites are expected to be locally adapted to sympatric hosts. Also, during adaptation to the host, an increase of parasite fitness could have direct consequences on its aggressiveness (i.e. the quantity of damages caused to the host by the virus). These two phenomena have been observed in the context of pathogen adaptation to host qualitative and monogenic...

The growing interest for studying questions in the wild requires acknowledging that eco-evolutionary processes are complex, hierarchically structured and often partially observed or with measurement error. These issues have long been ignored in evolutionary biology, which might have led to flawed inference when addressing evolutionary questions. Hierarchical modelling (HM) has been proposed as a generic statistical framework to deal with complexity in ecological data and account for uncertainty. However, to date, HM has seldom been...

Black rats are major invasive vertebrate pests with severe ecological, economic and health impacts. Remarkably, their evolutionary history has received little attention, and there is no firm agreement on how many species should be recognized within the black rat complex. This species complex is native to India and Southeast Asia. According to current taxonomic classification, there are three taxa living in sympatry in several parts of Thailand, Cambodia and Lao People's Democratic Republic, where this...

Loci considered to be under selection are generally avoided in attempts to infer past demographic processes as they do not fit neutral model assumptions. However, opportunities to better reconstruct some aspects of past demography might thus be missed. Here we examined genetic differentiation between two sympatric European oak species with contrasting ecological dynamics (Quercus robur and Q. petraea) with both outlier (i.e. loci possibly affected by divergent selection between species or by hitchhiking effects with...

Most invasive species established in Europe originate from either Asia or North America, but little is currently known about the potential of the Anatolian Peninsula (Asia Minor) and/or the Near East to constitute invasion sources. Mediterranean forests are generally fragile ecosystems that can be threatened by invasive organisms coming from different regions of the Mediterranean Basin, but for which historical data are difficult to gather and the phylogeographic patterns are still poorly understood for most...

Unraveling the mechanisms involved in adaptation to understand plant morphological evolution is a challenging goal. For crop species, identification of molecular causal polymorphisms involved in domestication traits are central to this issue. Pearl millet, a domesticated grass mostly found in semi-arid areas of Africa and India, is an interesting model to address this topic: the domesticated form shares common derived phenotypes with some other cereals such as a decreased ability to develop basal and axillary...

A major goal in evolutionary biology is to uncover the genetic basis of adaptation. Divergent selection exerted on ecological traits may result in adaptive population differentiation and reproductive isolation and affect differentially the level of genetic divergence along the genome. Genome-wide scan of large sets of individuals from multiple populations is a powerful approach to identify loci or genomic regions under ecologically divergent selection. Here, we focused on the pea aphid, a species complex of...

An understanding of the evolutionary history and dynamics of invasive species is required for the construction of predictive models of future spread, and the design of biological management measures. The black rat (Rattus rattus) is a major vertebrate invader with a worldwide distribution. Despite the severe ecological, economic and health impacts of this species, its evolutionary history has been little studied. We carried out extensive specimen sampling in Senegal, West Africa, and used microsatellite markers...

Natural hybridization is attracting much interest in modern speciation and conservation biology studies, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear why environmental changes often increase hybridization rates. To study this question, we surveyed mating events in a mixed oak stand and developed a spatially-explicit individual-based hybridization model. This model, where hybridization is frequency dependent, pollen is non-limiting and which allows immigrant pollen to compete with local pollen, takes into account...