Evolution impacts our daily lives although this fact is easy to overlook. As we face emerging issues on our planet, a major unknown is how fast organisms will evolve to face challenges such as emerging infectious disease, climate change, and anti-microbial drug resistance. This course seeks to introduce students to lab-based methods for exploring basic evolutionary questions and the underlying theory behind evolution occurring on short time scales, so called microevolution. With the current ease of genomic sequencing, microbial systems provide an ideal platform for understanding the process of adaptation through “evolve and resequence” experiments. Students will gain hands-on experience with the bioinformatics behind this experimental design. The centerpiece of the course is a group-based research project, which will be associated with both a proposal and a final report. The instructors will help facilitate the projects, which will utilize a diversity of study organisms, such as microinvertebrates, protists, fungi, bacteria, viruses and others. 

The weekly course will consist of one 1.5 hour lecture and one 3 hour lab period for 3 credit hours. 

This course is intended for upper-level undergraduates who have taken evolution and genetics (or simultaneous enrollment) and graduate students. Graduate students looking for experimental systems to integrate into their thesis research would also benefit from the course.

Course times: 

Tuesdays 1:00-2:30 PM

Thursdays 1:00-4:00 PM (Can work around EEB seminar schedule)

Instructor: Tim James, tyjames@umich.edu