Outreach Event: Breaking Bread: Exploring the Evolution of Amylase in Humans. Evolution, Diversity, Art and Community, Festa Major de Gràcia & ESEB 2025

As part of the ESEB outreach initiative, Thomas Hitchcock and I hosted the bilingual event “Breaking Bread: Exploring the Evolution of Amylase in Humans” at Barcelona’s Festa Major de Gràcia. This hands-on, family-friendly activity invited children and adults to engage with the science of human evolution, through food, play and interactive simulations.

Amylase, the enzyme responsible for starch digestion, has a remarkable evolutionary story. With copy number variation linked to dietary history and environmental adaptation, the amylase locus offers a unique lens into how mutation, selection, and recombination shape the human genome. Participants explored this dynamic region of the genome through a series of engaging stations designed to make complex genetics both tangible and fun.

Activity Stations Included:

Taste & Guess: Children and adults chewed pieces of bread and tried to “taste” their salivary amylase activity, learning how this enzyme breaks down starch into sugar. They then compared their guesses to real-world data on AMY1 copy number variation across global populations.

Lego Copy-Number Builder: Using color-coded Lego bricks, participants constructed amylase gene haplotypes. This helped illustrate how recombination and structural changes can result in the remarkable diversity of amylase loci observed in modern humans.

Snakes and Ladders of Amylase Evolution (HaploLadders): Participants played a custom version of Snakes and Ladders where landing on a ladder represented a gene duplication (gain of AMY1 copies), while being eaten by a snake led to a deletion (loss of copies). Importantly, reaching the end of the board didn’t necessarily mean a high copy number, some players finished the game with only a few amylase copies. This illustrated a key evolutionary insight: more is not always better. Copy number variation of the amylase gene is shaped by adaptation to local diets, not by a universal selective pressure for high copy numbers. Through play, participants explored how mutation and recombination introduce variation, and how selection and drift shape the diversity seen in human populations today.

ShinyApp Simulation – Mini Haplotype Evolution: On their phones families ran simulations to see how copy number variation evolves under different conditions, eg. mutation, selection, drift, or bottlenecks, visualized as evolving haplotype graphs over generations.