Molecules as documents of evolutionary history: 50 years after – Roscoff, Brittany, France.

It is with the popularization of molecular tools and the disclosure of genome sequences that evolutionary models have become decisive in biology, in part because this information is simply so abundant and so complex that only a comparative method could reveal its meaning.

In 2016, it will be 50 years that Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling have laid the foundation of molecular phylogeny, and molecular evolution in general, in their seminal article entitled «Molecules as documents of evolutionary history». The fundamental realization of this article was that DNA does not only encode the elementary functional elements of an organisms, it also harbours abundant information on the evolutionary history and life history traits of its ancestors.

The modelling of the evolutionary processes that generated extent genomes should reveal together the patterns of the diversification of life, the processes by which evolution proceeds at the molecular level, and how both are affected by external conditions. Our challenge today, as evolutionary biologists, is to bridge the gap between species ecology, life history traits, population dynamics, species phylogeny, gene phylogeny, genome structure, gene network and molecular mechanisms.

The recent years have seen tremendous developments in this direction, which we will attempt to review in this conference.

ABBY Sophie (Paris, France)
Evolution playing a molecular building set: origins and distribution of bacterial secretion systems

ACHTMAN Mark (Warwick, United Kingdom)
Ages of bacterial pathogenes

ALM Eric (Cambridge, USA)
Driving forces of microbiome evolution

DURET Laurent (Lyon, France)
Biased gene conversion as a 4rth evolutionary force

FARIA Nuno (Oxford, United Kingdom)
Viral evolution

GALTIER Nicolas (Montpellier, France)
Population genomics of non model animals: genetic diversity, adaptive rate and effective population size

GILBERT Thomas (Copenhaguen, Denmark)
Ancient DNA, ancient genomes, and the hype of de-extinction

GOGARTEN Peter (Storrs, USA)
Horizontal gene transfer: the pan-genome as shared genetic resource of a lineage​

GRAUR Dan (Houston, USA)
The vocabulary of molecular evolution and the transgressions of functional genomics: a rose by any other name would be misleading

GRIBALDO Simonetta (Paris, France)
Phylogenomics and the tree of life

HEATH Tracy (Berkeley, USA)
Molecular, morphological, and macroevolutionary models for dating species divergence times

KATZ Laura (Northampton, USA)
The eukaryotic phylogeny

KOSIOL Carolin (Vienna, Austria)
Polymorphism-aware phylogenetic models for species trees

LAGERGREN Jens (Stockholm, Sweden)
Generative models of gene family evolution

LỐPEZ-GARCIA Purificación (Orsay, France)
Diversity of microbial life

McLYSAGHT  Aoife (Dublin, Ireland)
Whole genome duplication

MORAN Nancy (Austin, USA)
Symbiosis in evolution

PAGEL Mark (Reading, United Kingdom)
Beyond molecular data: information and evolution in the cultural realm

PHILIPPE Hervé (Moulis, France)
Models of sequence evolution

SANMARTIN Isabel (Madrid, Spain)
Spatiotemporal evolution of lineages and biotas using Bayesian approaches

SEMON Marie (Lyon, France)
Insights into making different types of the same organ using developmental transcriptomes as molecular microscopes

STADLER Tanja (Zürich, Switzerland)
Modelling and inference of species diversification

SZÖLLÖSI Gergely (Budapest, Hungary)
Genome scale reconstruction of phylogenies

TELFORD Maximilian J. (London, United Kingdom)
The new animal phylogeny

WARNOW Tandy (Urbana, USA)
New coalescent-based species tree estimation methods