Dr. Hélène Jourdan

Research interests

During my PhD, I studied the evolutionary consequences of Parsley frog’s breeding strategies. It is a small frog that is common in Mediterranean ponds. I performed fieldwork in the Montpellier Region to study the breeding pattern of local populations. I use molecular markers to do standard genetic structure analyses and also to infer individual breeding strategies (with relatedness measures). In parallel, I built an experimental rearing device to characterize larval traits of tadpoles linked with each breeding strategy.

I showed that Parsley frog display highly plastic larval traits and probably use a bet-hedging breeding strategy.
In my post-doc, I will study sex-reversal in amphibian, more precisely treefrogs (Hyla arborea) and common frog (Rana temporaria). Sex-reversed individuals have the genotype of one sex and are turned into the other sex under environmental induction (by temperature or hormones). I will determine recombination rates in sex-reversed frogs (reversed in the lab) compared to “normal frogs” and test the following hypothesis: recombination patterns depend on the phenotypic sex and not the genotypic sex. This project is included in a broader study of sex chromosome evolution (see Nicolas Perrin’s group).

Follow us:  

HJourdan.jpg

helene.jourdan[@]unil.ch

Member of Perrin group