Large-scale structural variants such as chromosomal inversions may play an important role in speciation by restricting recombination in heterokaryotypes and protecting co-adapted or locally advantageous allelic combinations. However, there are still many uncertainties about the underlying mechanisms that lead to the appearance, establishment and maintenance of inversions. The Ancestral Recombination Graph (ARG) provides an ideal conceptual framework for exploiting all the genetic ancestry information contained in a sample of genome sequences, and holds promise for studying the evolutionary dynamics of inversions.

My postdoc forms part of the ARG2EVOL project (BIOPOLIS collaboration with CIBIO in Porto) and aims to use ARG-based inferences to investigate the evolution of large structural variants and their role in speciation in three different marine species. We aim to characterise the age and origin of the inversions, and to determine which processes affect their long-term evolution, such as the accumulation of genetic load.