My research interests focus on the ecological and evolutionary significance of polyploid (as well as Whole Genome Duplication, WGD). There is a large body of literature depicting the functional and evolutionary innovation and potential conferred by WGD, while some report that WGD could be detrimental and deadly. The debate of the ecological and evolutionary significance of polyploidy suggests that the consequence of being a polyploid largely depends on the ecological condition that the polyploid is inhabiting and coping with. Recent studies show that there is a nonrandom pattern of WGD occurence across the evolutionary timeline of diverse species, for example a recent research elucidated that a wave of successful genome duplications is associated with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary in the analysis of 41 plant genomes. The association between WGD and massive extinction events (glaciation events, etc.) provides strong evidence that WGD is an important evolutionary force for survival and success, especially in extreme environments. For now, the confirmed association reported in literature is quite limited in taxa sampling and reliability. I'm trying to build a reliable WGD dating system to explore connections between WGD and massive extinction events in more lineages (mainly angiosperms). The commonness of WGD accumulating around the boundary of massive extinction events across the tree of life would be a powerful argument for the selective advantage of WGD in harsh environments.

We study the evolution of genes, genomes and (polyploid) organisms

Yves Van de Peer is Full Professor at Ghent University and Science Director of the VIB, Center for Plant Systems Biology (Ghent, Belgium). He obtained his PhD in 1996 at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Axel Meyer at the University of Konstanz, Germany, he was hired at Ghent University (BE) as Group Leader of VIB (Department of Plant Systems Biology) in 2000 and as an Associate Professor at Ghent University in 2001 and promoted to Full Professor in 2008. Yves Van de Peer’s research group is considered a genome analysis powerhouse specialized in the study of the structure and evolution of (plant) genomes. Because of their unique expertise and experience in gene prediction, genome annotation, and genome analysis, his research group has been, and still is, involved in many international genome projects. Yves Van de Peer is particularly interested in the study of gene and genome duplications as well as in the evolution of novel gene functions after duplication. Yves Van de Peer published more than 550 papers, many of which in high-profile journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Reviews Genetics, Science, PNAS, Genome Research, and The Plant Cell. Yves Van de Peer has an H-index > 135 and his work has been cited more than 90,000 times (google scholar). For many consecutive years, Yves Van de Peer has been a Highly Cited Researcher. In 2013, Yves Van de Peer received an ERC Advanced Grant entitled “DOUBLE-UP: The evolutionary significance of genome duplications for natural and artificial organism populations”, and in 2018 another one entitled “DOUBLE-TROUBLE: Replaying the ‘genome duplication’ tape of life: the adaptive potential of polyploidy in a stressful or changing environment”. Yves Van de Peer has been Organizer and Chair of the bi-annual international Current Opinion Conference on Plant Genome Evolution, held in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019. In 2019, Yves Van de Peer also organized the triannual International Conference on Polyploidy, Ghent, Belgium. Yves Van de Peer is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB; since 2012) and serves on the Editorial Boards of five international journals (The Plant Journal, PeerJ, Genome Biology and Evolution, Current Plant Biology, Frontiers in Genetics). Yves Van de Peer is also part-time professor at the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology, at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and at the College of Horticulture at Nanjing Agricultural University, China.

I did a bachelor in Biochemistry and Biotechnology in Ghent and got increasingly more interested in bioinformatics and the potential thereof. This led me to choose bioinformatics as major for my master, and eventually led me to this PhD position. I am mostly interested in answering fundamental questions about evolution. Especially, I am interested in learning how present genomes came to be and how they evolved through time. Genomes are impressively complex and diverse, and this intrigues me. Specifically, I study the role of Whole Genome Duplications (WGDs) in the establishment of complex genomes. For this, I mostly focus on duckweed as model system. My PhD position is a bit different from a conventional PhD. Besides my research project, I will also focus on some side projects such as maintaining this site. Because of that, my PhD will be longer.