Understanding how species are able to rapidly respond to climate change is a challenging problem of modern biology. Under quickly-changing environmental conditions a population can be adaptively mismatched and then face a decline in size. Such decline usually brings along an accumulation of deleterious mutations (also known as genetic load), which may trigger genomic meltdown and population extinction. In fact, adaptation to fast changing conditions is commonly considered unlikely. However, species-specific ecological and/or evolutionary histories of some populations could have selected and preserved genetic variation which could be adaptive under current changes. In addition, novel genetic variation could also appear more quickly then expected in small populations due to e.g., accumulation of structural genomic variants, transposable elements mobilization, or random fixation of slightly deleterious alleles with non-additive epistatic interactions. Genomic meltdown and adaptation are so critically intertwined that a light imbalance in one or the other direction will determine the fate of the population between extinction and survival. In this line of research, we aim to study different type of genomic diversity (i.e., neutral, adaptive and deleterious) in small (or declining) and large natural populations of different species to understand their evolutionary trajectories and develop predictive models of survival probability under changing environmental conditions.

Successful candidates are expected to have relevant background in evolutionary biology, population genetics, genomics, and molecular ecology. Preferred skills include bioinformatics, computational and scripting background, genomics data analyses, population dynamics data modelling, and simulation of genomic data.

The Department of Life and Environmental Sciences has high-quality expertise in a wide range of relevant disciplines including marine biology and ecology, and protection, conservation and restoration of marine environments (http://www.disva.univpm.it/). The research group, supervised by Trucchi, where the PhD will be integrated, is currently including two postdocs, one Marie Curie fellow and one visiting, three PhD students, and three Master students. The PhD student will have access to research samples, equipment and resources required, as well as the DiSVA high-throughput computational and storage resources which is necessary to tackle questions in evolutionary genomics.