Online presentation Prof. Eric Hom

On behalf of Prof. Maria Mittag, we invite you to attend a lecture by Prof Erik Hom, University of Mississippi, on 15.07.2021 at 15:00 via livestream. In order to attend go to online.mmz.uni-jena.de and select "Hörsaal Am Planetarium 1"

Prof. Erik Hom,  University of Mississippi, USA, currently  on a sabbatical at iDiv in Leipzig (website: http://darwinsdaemon.com/ ).

Talk title and brief abstract:

On Franken-Lichens and Sloths

I am a 2021 sabbatical visitor at iDiv based in Leipzig.  In this talk, I will present work on two projects being pursued in my lab and with iDiv collaborators aimed at elucidating: (1) the physiological responses of symbiotic partners in synthetic fungal-algal symbioses, i.e., “franken-lichens,” and (2) the biodiversity and chemical ecology of the algae-containing sloth fur microbiome.  Both projects extend my lab’s broad efforts to understand microbial biodiversity and ecology in light of complementary, genetically-encoded functional traits.  I will present the background to these projects and contextualize how we seek to develop a more complete understanding of the early evolution, ecology, and phylogenetic breadth of plant-microbe symbioses, as we as the mechanisms driving sloth ecology and microbiome diversity.