Silva Uusi-Heikkilä
PhD in Evolutionary Ecology. Docent in Evolutionary Biology
silva.uusi-heikkila@utu.fi Natura, yliopistonmäki Turku |
Evolutionary ecology; Experimental ecology; Molecular biology; Next-generation sequencing; Genomics; Microbiomes.
Equine gut microbiota and responses to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) at the molecular level: FINEBIOME (Finnish eDNA/equine microbiome). Fisheries-induced evolution and adaptive potential.
Currently I am investigating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in horses and how it affects gut microbiota diversity and composition and the function of mitochondria in the gut.
I am also studying the effect of anthropogenic stressors on experimental fish populations. My main focus has been on the effect of size-selective fisheries and during the recent years we have exposed the fish populations to other stressors occurring simultaneously, such as thermal stress, starvation, pollution and infections. In my research group, we have studied the responses at both phenotypic and molecular level (whole genome sequencing, whole genome bisulfate sequencing and RNA sequencing). We also study how thermal stress, hypoxia and genotype affects fish skin microbiota diversity and composition.
Finally, I have studied community ecology by modeling aquatic food webs and their dynamics in response to changes in life-history strategies, stocking and size-selective fishing.
- Food Web Properties and the Type of Invasive Species Make the Ecosystem Vulnerable to Invasion (2026)
- Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems
- Thermal stress has greater impact on the zebrafish skin microbiota than host genotype (2026)
- Journal of Thermal Biology
- Directional selection, not the direction of selection, affects telomere length and copy number at ribosomal RNA loci (2024)
- Scientific Reports
- Does size-selective harvesting erode adaptive potential to thermal stress? (2024)
- Ecology and Evolution
- Fisheries-induced life-history changes recover in experimentally harvested fish populations (2024)
- Biology Letters
- Fish with slow life-history cope better with chronic manganese exposure than fish with fast life-history (2024)
- Ecology and Evolution
- Food-web complexity, consumer behavior, and diet specialism: impacts on ecosystem stability (2024)
- Theoretical Ecology
- Gut Microbiota Profiling as a Promising Tool to Detect Equine Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) (2024)
- Animals
- Mutually exclusive feeding yields Holling type III functional response (2024)
- Functional Ecology
- Size-selective harvesting drives genomic shifts in a harvested population (2024)
- Journal of Fish Biology



