Event Series

EEB Seminar A weekly meeting of the minds where invited speakers share their latest research

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Date

November 6, 2026

Time

9:30 am - 10:30 am

Location

Earth Sciences Building, ESC B149 & online

online access

Nandita Garud is an associate professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Human Genetics at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. Her laboratory focuses on quantifying the mode and tempo of evolution in natural populations, with an emphasis on the microbiome. She synthesizes population genetics, statistics, and analysis of population genomic data, including metagenomic data, to develop and apply new computational methods to make population genetic inferences from publicly available data, and data generated by collaborators.

Learn more about the Garud Lab.

EEB Seminar Description

The human gut microbiome is a hotbed of evolution, with estimates of billions of mutations entering a single host’s microbiome daily.  For us humans, this genetic dynamism is both an opportunity (e.g., enabling digestion of new foods) and a challenge (e.g. the evolution of drug resistance). Despite the potential importance of these effects, we currently know very little about the targets, rapidity and pervasiveness of evolution in gut bacteria. I will present our recent work quantifying selective sweeps accruing within ~40 prevalent species of gut bacteria within hosts on daily and monthly timescales, as well as across hosts on timescales exceeding a human lifetime. In summary, we demonstrate that selective sweeps are a common feature of human gut microbiomes and that targets of selection may be strongly impacted by host lifestyle and diets around the world.

Host: Megan Frederickson