Natural resistances in crops have the inherent disadvantage of promoting counter-resistance in herbivores and pathogens through natural selection. As a result, harmful organisms will eventually adapt to crop resistance and become pests. In the current state of science, this is unpredictable and therefore pest control is reactive. At EPB, we discovered specific groups of proteins in crops and in herbivores that together determine plant-herbivore compatibility. Using 'protein co-evolution in a petri dish', we determine which mutations in the crop proteins make it resistant to the pest, followed by determining which counterpart mutations in the pest proteins will reverse this resistance. The goal is to empirically show that pest control can be proactive if one knows which alleles allow the pest to adapt to a resistant host plant and monitors their frequency of occurrence in local pest populations.

While natural systems often display much more variation than agricultural or laboratory systems, we still see many examples of independent but repeated evolutionary outcomes. At EPB, we study several closely related wood ant species that interbreed and successfully hybridize, resulting in exchange of genetic material and formation of hybrid populations. This is remarkable because the mixing of such dissimilar genomes will usually fail. However, when hybridization succeeds, this creates a large amount of novel genetic variation that may offer many opportunities for rapid evolution. By combining genomics, experiments in the field and lab and experimental evolution, we aim to better understand when hybridization contributes to adaptation and stable species co-existence and whether we can predict the fate of hybridization events. As species ranges are shifting in response to global climate change, and hybridization becomes more prevalent, this knowledge is important for predicting the future health of ecosystems.

Through the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA), EPB is involved in the Origins Center, which is the national knowledge center for research into the origins and evolution of life on Earth and in the universe. At EPB, we use the model nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and naturally co-occurring in experimental evolution experiments in different environments. These experiments are designed to discover which properties of populations and communities influence the repeatability of evolution at the level of genotype, phenotype, and fitness. Inspired by the experimental outcomes, we also develop computational approaches to forecast genetic changes.