Guillaume J. Dury

I’m an evolutionary biologist interested in interactions. These include interactions between herbivores and their hosts, parents and their offspring, and organisms and their environment. In my research on these many interactions, I’ve used a combination of laboratory experiments, field experiments and theoretical modelling. I also really enjoy natural history and I keep it in mind to highlight interesting questions and inform my research. In terms of organisms, I am particularly drawn to plants and insects, in part because they’re both always present around us!

Explaining why certain lineages of organisms split into more species—or diversify—more than other lineages is one of biology’s key questions. In the tropics, where species are especially numerous and diverse, some genera contain many more species than others. One hypothesis to explain this is that hyper-diverse genera have innovative chemical defenses, which allowed their ancestors to escape predators (i.e., herbivores and pathogens) thereby becoming more successful than other plant genera. This success then allowed them to split into more species than closely related genera without the chemical defense innovations. As a Stengl-Wyer Postdoctoral Scholar & Provost’s Early Career Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, I joined the laboratory group of Dr. Brian Sedio. With him I plan is to test the chemical defense innovation hypothesis by finding the genetic signatures of those key innovations in defensive chemistry and testing whether they do, in fact, accompany increased diversity.