Bram Kuijper

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Contact

Phone : +31(0)50-363 8094

Email : a.l.w.kuijper (AT: rug.nl)

Room : B 021/022

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Project: Sexual conflict and the evolution of sex determining systems

The decision to produce a boy or a girl can be fraught with several genetic conflicts: conflicts between mothers and offspring, between cytoplasmic elements and the Y chromosome, between fathers and mothers, between a driving X chromosome and the autosome and so forth.

How such genetic conflicts destabilize sex determining mechanisms and potentially lead to new ones is the central question in my project. To investigate this question, I aim to model a number of key genetic conflicts and their selective forces they impose on sex determining genes.

One aspect that I focus on is the importance of biological mechanisms and constraints involved in sex determination: currently, it is difficult to make much sense of the data on regulatory basis of sex determination: how did the elaborate sex determining cascades we see in flies, mammals and worms come about? Are chromosomal constraints really that important when explaining the limited distribution of parental sex-ratio control in vertebrates, or are other regulatory aspects involved? What is the role of the sex determining mechanism in controlling the amount of sex-limited expression, and why do we find so much variation in sex-limited expression between individuals?

Main topics of my research:

• Can we reveal general patterns how sex determining mechanisms may be shaped by different genetic conflicts? By systematically analyzing a range of key genetic conflicts and their potential to drive evolutionary change in sex determining mechanisms, can we find that some sex-determining mechanisms are more prone to change by certain genetic conflicts than others?
• Does the addition of relevant biological mechanisms improve the explanatory power of models regarding evolutionary change in sex-determination? How can we explain the evolution of specific sex-determing cascades?
• How is the interaction between genetic conflicts and sex determining mechanisms affected by species-specific ecological contexts: to what extent do ecological variables such as differences in dispersal, the mating system or condition-dependence of sex-specific fitness limit or provoke genetic conflicts?

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Publications

B. Kuijper, L. Schärer and I. Pen. The strength of sexual selection in hermaphrodites versus gonochorists. In preparation.

B. Kuijper, I. Pen. (2009). Evolution of haplodiploidy by male-killing endosymbionts: importance of spatial population structure and endosymbiont mutualisms. J. Evol. Biol. In Press.

B. Kuijper, E.H. Morrow, (2009). Direct observation of female mating frequency using time-lapse photography. Fly 3: 1-3.

B. Feldmeyer, M. Kozielska, B. Kuijper, F.J. Weissing, L.W. Beukeboom, I. Pen (2008): Climatic variation and the geographical distribution of sex determining mechanisms in the housefly. Evol. Ecol. Res. 10: 797-809.

T.W. Fawcett, B. Kuijper, I. Pen, & F.J. Weissing (2006): Should attractive males have more sons? Behav. Ecol. 18: 71-80.

B. Kuijper, A.D. Stewart & W.R. Rice (2006): The cost of mating rises nonlinearly with copulation frequency in a laboratory population of Drosophila melanogaster. J. Evol. Biol. 19: 1795 - 1802.

M. van de Pol, L.W. Bruinzeel, D. Heg, B. Kuijper & S. Verhulst (2006): Experimental and observational evidence that reproductive performance improves with pair bond duration in oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus). Behav. Ecol. 17: 982 - 991.

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Scientific Career

During my master's degree, I visited the lab of Bill Rice at UC Santa Barbara to work on the costs of multiple mating in Drosophila melanogaster.

Before I took up my Ph.D. position in Groningen, I was a visiting researcher at Ted Morrow's lab at the University of Uppsala.

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