This project will mainly be used for the storage of large amounts of genomic and transcriptomic data from the microbial model system Saccharomyces yeasts. The data will be generated and used by PhD students and postdocs in Rike Stelkens’ lab. The main purpose of this project is to test for parallel climate adaptation at a global scale, using wild yeast populations. Species with vast latitudinal ranges from temperate to subpolar regions experience different environmental and seasonal conditions. These are valuable systems for understanding adaptation to changing and extreme environments, evolutionary responses to climate change, and extinction risks in vulnerable regions. Clines with climatic conditions mirrored on opposite sides of the equator provide an excellent but rarely used opportunity to test for parallel evolution. Going poleward from the equator, we may observe the independent evolution of similar adaptations due to converging selection pressures. So far, most research on parallel evolution has focused on replicated clines in the Northern Hemisphere, usually on the same continent. The few exceptions that include the global north and south are limited to very few species. Importantly, no study on parallelism exists in microbial systems at a global scale, despite their fundamental role in ecosystems. This project will rectify this shortcoming and use wild populations of three species of Saccharomyces yeast from forests of the Northern (Europe/Scandinavia) and Southern Hemisphere (Patagonia, Chile) to test for parallelism in temperature adaptation along inverse latitudes, scrutinize their potential to adapt to future global warming with experimental evolution, and determine which genetic and regulatory toolkits wild microbes use to adapt. As disease outbreaks are intensified due to climate change, we will also test whether yeast evolves pathogenic potential as a by-product of thermotolerance. Synthesising across these aims, we will use data-driven predictive modelling to identify key drivers of thermal adaptation. In addition, this storage project will also be used for two other projects in the lab: 1) Study of the molecular evolution of immune system genes in the fungus Podospora anserina. For this project the analyses consisted mostly on population genomics analyses (variant calling, calculation of nucleotide diversity, Tajima’s D, and dXY statistics). The expectation was that genes with an immune system should display evidence of diversifying or balancing selection. We indeed found such evidence, and we additionally discovered that a specific type of gene class is subject to higher mutation rates. The results are now part of a preprint and under evaluation in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution. 2)Characterizing the sex determination of the two-spotted goby, Pomatoschistus flavescens. This small fish is an abundant member of coastal ecosystems of Norway and Sweden. Notably, the populations of this species have strong female-bias sex rations. However, the sex determination of this fish was previously unknown, obscuring the possible causes. For this project we used PacBio technology to sequence the genome of a male individual. We created a curated genome assembly to use as reference. We further sequenced four individuals with Illumina sequence and used them for k-mer and diversity analyses to find the sex-determining locus. The manuscript of this project is currently under preparation.