EEB Thursday Seminar Series - Monkeys in Extremis: Building Multi-Omics Models for Characterizing Adaptations to Environmental Stress in Wild Primates

This event is part of our ongoing Thursday Seminar Series.

About this seminar: Anthropogenic climate change is rapidly altering local ecologies... how vulnerable or robust are primates, including humans, to environmental variation, and what can this tell us about developmental impacts on lifetime health? Prof. Schmitt uses behavioral ecology, morphometric, and multiple -omics methods to study mechanistic and adaptive aspects of these questions in two non-human primate models: savanna monkeys (Chlorocebus spp.), and woolly monkeys (Lagothrix spp.). His work with Chlorocebus demonstrates that there are both heritable and epigenetic components to developmental patterns that help us to better understand the interplay between extremes in resource quality and energetics, life history, and metabolic disease. His developing work on Lagothrix expands the use of portable genomics technologies to delve into how diet, sociality, and genetic variation interact to enable the energetics of high-elevation living while also potentially constraining climatic adaptability.