Polyploidy, or Whole-Genome Duplication (WGD) resulting from the duplication of the entire genome of an organism or cell, has an enormous impact across a huge scale, from genes and genomes, cells and tissues, organisms, and even entire ecosystems. Polyploidy is also the source of much of life on Earth as most eukaryotes carry the genomic signature of one or more WGD events. WGD is thus central to the study of all life as well as central to the study of genetics, evolution, and ecology. Nearly all agricultural crops are polyploid, as are many human organs (e.g., the liver, heart, and placenta).
Yet, despite the wide-reaching importance of polyploidy, communication across disciplinary boundaries to identify common themes has been largely nonexistent. A critical need remains to understand the many commonalities that derive from shared polyploid cellular processes across organismal diversity, levels of biological organization, and fields of inquiry – from biodiversity and biocomplexity to medicine and agriculture.
WGD results in numerous recurring downstream effects that are common across biological scales and diverse organisms, including cell cycle, cell growth, gene expression, epigenetics, and gene interaction networks. Surprisingly, however, polyploidy remains underexplored in numerous contexts, and its diverse roles and impact in biological processes and across the tree of life remain unclear. Despite the evolutionary, ecological, and economic importance of polyploidy, its study has long been hindered by a lack of synthesis and pursuit of common goals, in large part because research efforts have historically been siloed. Researchers across diverse fields—cell biology, physiology, evolution, ecology, genomics, agriculture, and cancer—rarely, if ever, interact, despite asking very similar questions regarding the drivers and consequences of polyploidy.
Both plant and fly researchers have held separate polyploidy conferences. The first plant-oriented conference was in 2002 in London. Subsequent conferences occurred every three or four years in different locations in Europe. Endopolyploidy researchers have held a few conferences in recent years starting in 2018 in Bar Harbor, Maine to discuss polyploidy in Organ Development, Repair, and Disease. However only recently have these conferences included a few researchers outside of the focus area of research. Those initial cross discipline interactions were important, illustrating, for example, at the Plant Polyploidy Conference in Ghent (2019) that research groups were isolated, despite asking similar questions; the meeting also revealed the value of broad interdisciplinary interaction (see Fox et al. 2020).
Our main goal with this conference is to truly integrate for the first time, polyploidy speakers and researchers across diverse systems (plants, vertebrates, yeast, flies), as well as at the level of organization (cells to ecosystems), and research areas (genetics, genomics, ecology/evolution). By so doing, we will uncover both the commonalities and distinctive roles of WGD across lineages of life and at diverse levels of biological organization: gene regulation, cell function, organ formation, organismal survival/performance, and landscape-level assembly and ecological responses. A polyploidy conference will help promote shared research themes and elements, and yield insights into new directions to integrate research on polyploidy. These efforts will help researchers confront interdisciplinary grand challenges of the 21st century, benefiting basic as well as applied research. We hope that this will be the first of what will be a continued series of interdisciplinary polyploidy conferences.