Dear evoldir,

We are excited to be hosting a symposium on "The genetic basis of
evolutionary rescue" at SMBE 2026 (June 28 - July 2, Copenhagen). We
encourage those of you working on relevant topics to submit an abstract,
due Feb 3 (smbe2026.org).

Invited speaker: Julia Kreiner (University of Chicago)

Symposium organizers: Matthew Osmond (University of Toronto) and 
Hildegard Uecker (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology)

Symposium abstract:

Rapid evolution can rescue populations from extinction. How often it 
does is of fundamental importance for the evolution of species' niches 
and geographic ranges. It is also of great applied relevance in 
conservation, where rescue is desired, and in agriculture and medicine, 
where resistance is unwanted rescue.

To better understand and manipulate population persistence there is now 
a large body of research on "evolutionary rescue" ("resistance 
evolution" in applied contexts) ranging from mathematical models to 
experimental tests to observations in the wild. The increasing threats 
of climate change and drug resistance are only accelerating these 
efforts. In an attempt to unite and propel the growing field of 
evolutionary rescue, this symposium aims to bring together theoreticians 
and empiricists with interests across evolutionary biology, 
conservation, agriculture, and medicine.

More specifically, this symposium aims to highlight recent work on the 
genetic basis of evolutionary rescue. Early models commonly assumed 
single mutations of large effect or an effectively infinite number of 
infinitely small effect alleles. Experiments and natural observations 
have now shown that the genetic basis of rescue can be much more complex 
(involving, for example, epistasis, gene amplifications, and 
hybridization) and theory has begun to explore the consequences of some 
of these complexities. To highlight these obstacles and advances this 
symposium will address questions such as: what genetic bases of rescue 
do we observe, what genetic bases do we predict, how does the genetic 
basis affect the probability of rescue, and what are the genetic 
signatures of evolutionary rescue?

Matthew Osmond <mm.osmond@utoronto.ca>

(to subscribe/unsubscribe the EvolDir send mail to
golding@mcmaster.ca)