The hunt for evolution’s accelerator

Why does evolution proceed more quickly in some species than others? Can organisms become better at evolving new traits? These are a couple of the questions that Tobias Uller wants to answer during his time as a Wallenberg Scholar.

Evolution has resulted in an exceptional diversity of colours and shapes. Historically, evolutionary research has focused on the ecological factors that bring about natural selection – but where does the capacity for evolutionary adaptation and diversification come from?

“We want to investigate whether there are inherent factors that give certain species almost unlimited opportunities to try new variants while others stick within narrow boundaries,” says Tobias Uller.

The great variation in colour patterns in Mediterranean wall lizards is an example of how evolution can be anything but gradual, and how it can go astonishingly fast. The colour of wall lizards has baffled researchers since the 19th century. How can such great diversity develop within a single group of animals when all of them have a similar ecology?

A deep dive into chaos

Uller and his research group are to take a deep dive into the wall lizards’ chaos of variation – where a single species can have dozens of completely different variants, and where particular combinations of colours and patterns repeatedly evolve independently of one another. The researchers want to find out whether the exceptional evolution of colouration in wall lizards is because the capacity to produce something different is not a given, but is itself something that evolves.

One hypothesis to be explored is that different lineages sometimes exchange genes with each other and that this changes the very possibility of innovation. The aim is to understand what characterises genomes and developmental mechanisms with high evolutionary potential. Uller and his research group are to assess whether new colours and patterns arise through combinations of old genetic variants or whether there are regions of the genome that are prone to vary, and thereby give evolution new material to work with.