Dr. Rebecca A. Zufallfrom University of Houston visited IHB from October 21 to 25, 2014.

Dr. Rebecca A. Zufall from University of Houston paid a visit to Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHB) for scientific communication and international cooperation on T. thermophila evolution research from October 21 to 25. On October 21. She gave an oral presentation to researchers and students at the institute with the title of "Mutation, migration, and sex: evolutionary genetics in Tetrahymena thermophila". 

In her presentation, Dr. Rebecca A. Zufall systematically introduced the mutation, migration and sex in T. thermophila. She showed to the audience that T. thermophila is a very good model organism to study mutation accumulation because it has a silent germline nuclear that is not exposed to natural selection. Her research group had gotten preliminary results about mutation rate through next generation sequencing. In migration, she showed that T. thermophila was composed of multiple subdivided populations within a limited geographic range and gene flow is low between populations. In sex, she showed probabilistic sex determination can cause skewed sex ratios and T. thermophila mate randomly with respect to sex.  

After the presentation, Dr. Rebecca A. Zufall visited protozoa functional genomics research group. Together with the researchers and students in this research group, they discussed about the experiment evolutionary biology and sex evolution in T. thermophila in detail and built the cooperative relationship.