Juan César Vilardi
From
Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires - AR
In residence at
Host scientist
Philippe Rozenberg
BIOGRAPHY
Juan César Vilardi obtained the PhD in Biological Scences at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). He worked as Member of the Argentinian National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (UBA) and Full Professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Genetics of the UBA. Currently he is Consulting Full Professor of the University of Buenos Aires, has a Resarch Contract with the CONICET. He was in charge of courses related to Evolutionary and Population Genetics within the frame of degree and post-degree programs at his institution and other Argentinian research and educational centers, including the University of Rosario, National University of Río Cuarto, National University of North East, and National University of Santiago del Estero. Since 1992 Vilardi is founder and Director of the Laboratory of Applied Population Genetics of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences (UBA). He carried out a postdoctoral stay in INRA-Orleans, France and scientific visits to Israel, Venezuela, Brazil and USA. His research line is related with population and evolutionary genetics, maily oriented to genetic structure, adaptive strategies and natural selection components in different biological models, including insects and forest trees.
PROJECT
Adaptive strategies of forest trees to climate changes: Microevolution and Plasticity
The objective of this project is to coordinate and implement an integrated study of the genetic and plastic adaptation to climate of an important forest tree species, European larch. The study will combine powerful and recent population and quantitative genetics methods with data collected on an integrated multidisciplinary experimental trial installed by INRA along an altitude gradient in the French Alps. This experimental trial gather permanent forest plots with reciprocal transplant experiments, dendroecological phenotyping and microsatellite and SNP genotyping of the trees in the permanent plots. This integrated trial provides the opportunity to improve the quantification and the separation of the effects of phenotypic plasticity and genetic adaptation on the past and present response of European larch to climate variation. In this context, the role of Pr JC Vilardi will be to direct and harmonize all components of the ecological genetic and genomic analysis with the project partners.
Events organised by this fellow
Publications
Final reports
Larix decidua, the European larch, is an excellent model to evaluate the association between genetic and phenotypic variation with environmental gradients in forest species. In the present work we evaluated the genetic variation of neutral and selective SNP markers together with the variation of eight quantitative traits along an altitudinal gradient in a natural population of this species located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur Region (France). Four samples of about 200 trees each were obtained respectively from plots situated at 1350, 1700, 2000, and 2300 m above sea level. In each sampled individual four tree ring variables and four plasticity variables were evaluated. The molecular dataset consisted of the individual patterns of 46388 SNP loci. The joint analysis of molecular and quantitative trait data allowed evaluating population structure, detecting presumptively selective loci, and demonstrating the adaptive significance of the quantitative variables considered.