Ivain combines empirical and theoretical methods to investigate genetic conflicts related to sexual reproduction and the evolution of sex. He joined the group early in 2019 to build a population genetics model of the spore killing genes found in the Podospora and Neurospora genus. Spore killers are a category of meiotic drivers, selfish genetic elements that can spread in a population even though they impose a fitness cost to their hosts. Understanding how meiotic drivers behave in natural population will be an important step in our understanding of the living world, with many potential applications. Ivain was granted postdoc funding from The Swedish Research Council (VR), and was hosted by the CNRS in Bordeaux, France, to implement experimental evolution of the mating system of Podospora in response to spore killers. Currently, he is a postdoc at NTNU in Trondheim, working on the ecological sensitivity of the evolution of reproductive behavior in the two-spotted goby Pomatoschitus flavescens.
Search for Ivain Martinossi-Allibert's papers on the Publications page