Deborah Charlesworth, winner of the society for the study of evolution's inaugural lifetime achievement award: Evolutionary biology for the genomics era.

This in turn can drive the formation of "supergenes" comprising linked regions with multiple genes (or multiple mutations in a single gene) that determine the combined inheritance of complex adaptations (Charlesworth 2016). The Charlesworth model highlights that the spread of two-locus sex determination systems experience a strong "linkage constraint", where prior linkage disequilibrium between the two loci is important for their spread. Deborah Charlesworth is a pioneer in the study of evolutionary genetics and plant reproductive evolution, and it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which she has influenced the more general field of evolutionary biology over the last four decades. Deborah's genomic research in both I Silene latifolia i (Bergero et al. 2007) and collaborative work in papaya (Min et al. 2012) suggests, like humans (Lahn and Page 1999), the presence of evolutionary strata, indicating an ongoing evolutionary spread of recombination suppression occurs in plants. [Extracted from the article]