Once again, IBE joins efforts with Biocat and La Caixa, to lead state-of-the-art scientific debates alongside international experts on the topic. B·Debates aim to  foster debate, collaboration and open exchange of knowledge among experts of renowned national and international prestige in order to tackle complex challenges of high interest in the life sciences.

In this edition, led by by Jaume Bertranpetit and Elena Bosch from IBE (UPF-CSIC), international researchers from the areas of evolutionary biology, genetics, computation, biology and genomics but also from the fields of immunology, molecular and cell biology and medicine. This will generate an interdisciplinary forum for debate, and provide guidelines on how to handle and interpret the forthcoming huge amount of genomic information in order to reconstruct human evolution and understand the specificities of our species and of the diverse populations.

This goal is now possible through the analysis of full genome sequencing data and by detecting and interpreting the footprints that adaptive (positive) natural selection has left in our genomes. However, in order to effectively reveal the specific adaptations that happened in our common ancestors and that characterise different human populations, the field needs more powerful statistical methods as well as novel experimental molecular approaches and a variety of interdisciplinary methodologies.

Understanding our adaptation requires uncovering not only hard selective sweeps but also polygenic adaptation and soft sweeps. The final goal should be the interpretation of adaptive phenotypes, with experimental approaches that can demonstrate the functional impact of the adaptive variants.

When? 17 & 18 July 2017

Where? Palau Macaya. C/ Passeig de Sant Joan, 108. Barcelona

Find out more: http://www.bdebate.org/en/forum/natural-selection-humans-understanding-our-adaptations