Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Department of Biomedical Sciences in Rijeka and the Department of Natural Sciences, published an invitation to a lecture by Professor Paul B. Rainey, PhD, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön. The lecture will take place on 27 November, 2026, at 14:00 hours at the Faculty of Medicine in Rijeka , in lecture hall no. 15.
Forging an evolutionary individual from separate replicators
Major evolutionary transitions occur when independently replicating particles unite into a higher-level individual. How selection comes to work on particle collectives and generates reliable heredity is unresolved. By packaging red and green plasmids in yeast cells we made plasmid communities units of selection: cell boundaries supplied discreteness, segregation generated variation, and cell division reproduced communities. Communities colouring cells yellow were preferentially propagated. Initially, yellow parents rarely produced yellow offspring, but continued selection aligned replicative fates of the two plasmids favouring recombinants that fused with the endogenous 2µ element. Chimera stability was secured by mutations in FLP1, which encodes a recombinase that otherwise resolves fused replicons. Reliable collective heredity, here a derived product of higher-level selection, marked completion of an evolutionary transition in individuality.
About Paul B. Rainey:
Paul was born in New Zealand and completed his bachelors, masters and PhD at the University of Canterbury. From 1989 until 2005 he was based in the UK where most of his time was as researcher and then professor at the University of Oxford. He began transitioning back to New Zealand in 2003, firstly as Chair of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Auckland, but then in 2007 moved to the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study as one of its founding professors. Paul is currently Director of the Department of Microbial Population Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön (Germany) and Professor at ESPCI in Paris (France). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Member of EMBO and Member of the European Academy of Microbiology.