Dr. Adriana Biscoe
Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
University of California, Irvine
Title: The genetic origin of sexually dimorphic ultraviolet color vision in Heliconius butterflies
Abstract: The acquisition of novel sexually dimorphic traits poses an evolutionary puzzle: How do new traits arise and become sex-limited? Recently acquired color vision, sexually dimorphic in animals like primates and butterflies, presents a compelling model for understanding how traits become sex-biased. For example, some Heliconius butterflies uniquely possess UV (ultraviolet) color vision, which correlates with the expression of two differentially tuned UV-sensitive rhodopsins, UVRh1 and UVRh2. To discover how such traits become sexually dimorphic, we studied Heliconius charithonia, which exhibits female-specific UVRh1 expression. In this talk I will discuss our reconstruction of the first whole genome reference sequence for H. charithonia, including the recovery of both sex chromosomes, UV color vision behavior experiments, CRISPR gene inactivation of UVRh1, and a genus-wide survey of the chromosomal location of UVRh1 in Heliconius. Our results suggest a path for acquiring sexual dimorphism that is distinct from existing mechanistic models. We propose a model where gene traffic to heterosomes (the W or the Y) genetically partitions a trait by sex before a phenotype shifts (spectral tuning of UV sensitivity).
Biography: Adriana Briscoe received a BA in Philosophy, a BS in Biological Sciences, and an MA in Philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in Biology from Harvard University. She is a Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. Briscoe is known for studies of how color vision mediates ecological interactions between butterflies, host plants, and the environment, in the context of mimicry and species recognition. Her discoveries have been featured on television and in museums both in the USA and in Europe. She has written and spoken about the importance of teachers in developing future scientists and the need for increased funding for teacher training in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Briscoe previously held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a research fellowship at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, U.K.). She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the California Academy of Sciences and the Royal Entomological Society, and she was honored with the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science, the first woman and third person overall to have been given all three of these awards. Author of numerous articles and book chapters, Dr. Briscoe has delivered over 100 invited lectures. Her writing has appeared in The Conversation and in over 30 media outlets.
Dr. Leah Guthrie
Assistant Professor, BioEngineering
University of California, Berkeley
Title: A Quantitative Map of the Human–Microbe Metabolome
Abstract: Trillions of microbes inhabit the human gastrointestinal tract, collectively encoding enzymatic capabilities that transform dietary components into diverse signaling molecules that influence host physiology. Yet, the majority of small molecules detected in human metabolomic data remain unannotated. Understanding this unknown chemical space is critical for linking microbial activity to health outcomes such as chronic kidney disease. Here, we outline a quantitative framework that integrates chemoinformatics, ecological principles, and statistical inference to identify recurrent unannotated metabolites across independent LC–MS/MS datasets. This approach prioritizes metabolites that are both reproducible and predictive of kidney health, while quantifying metabolic divergence across microbial species to distinguish generalist from specialist functions. Together, these analyses provide a scalable strategy for decoding the chemical dialogue between humans and their microbiota and for transforming the dark metabolome into a quantitative map of human–microbe chemical interactions.
Biography: TBD