Seminar

Exploring natural genetic variation: from genomes to phenotypes

Joseph Schacherer

Understanding how genetic variation translates into phenotypic diversity remains one of the central challenges of modern genetics. Despite increasingly comprehensive descriptions of genomic variation, predicting its functional and phenotypic consequences remains difficult, particularly for complex traits shaped by multiple genetic and environmental factors. I will discuss how the study of natural genetic diversity can provide insights into the architecture of complex traits and the mechanisms connecting genotype to phenotype. Combining population genomics, quantitative genetics, and large-scale phenotyping makes it possible to explore the contribution of individual variants, genetic interactions, and environmental effects across diverse genetic backgrounds. Using Saccharomyces cerevisiae as an experimentally tractable model, I will illustrate how population-scale approaches can reveal general principles governing genetic and phenotypic variation. More broadly, I will discuss what natural diversity can teach us about the complexity, robustness, and predictability of genotype-to-phenotype relationships.