Monthly Archives: July 2013

What we're reading: Protease-enforced mutualistic exclusivity, predicting complex traits from SNPs, and keeping up with your scientific reading

In the journals Orona-Tamayo D., Wielsch N., Blanco-Labra A., Svatos A., Farías-Rodríguez R., Heil M., 2013 Exclusive rewards in mutualisms: ant proteases and plant protease inhibitors create a lock-key system to protect Acacia food bodies from exploitation. Molecular Ecology 22: … Continue reading

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What we're reading: Genetic diversity at the range edge, symbiote-mediated host shifting, and the T-rex nontroversy

In the journals Assis J., Castilho Coelho N., Alberto F., Valero M., Raimondi P., Reed D., Alvares Serrão E., 2013 High and distinct range-edge genetic diversity despite local bottlenecks (SJ Goldstien, Ed.). PLoS ONE 8: e68646. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0068646. As predicted, … Continue reading

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Will climate change be more relentless than evolution?

Ask any biologist what she considers the most urgently important example of adaptive evolution, and—even if she isn’t currently writing a grant proposal—she’ll probably mention global climate change. More than a century of pumping greenhouse gasses into Earth’s atmosphere has … Continue reading

Posted in phylogenetics, quantitative genetics | Tagged | 6 Comments

What we're reading: Invasion genetics, and New Zealand's cutest invader

Peter, B.M., and M. Slatkin. 2013. Detecting range expansions from genetic data. Evolution online early. doi: 10.1111/evo.12202. We introduce a statistic ψ (the directionality index) that detects asymmetries in the two-dimensional allele frequency spectrum of pairs of population. These asymmetries … Continue reading

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Why do we care about population structure?

Arun Sethuraman is a postdoctoral associate with Jody Hey, studying statistical models for divergence population genetics in the Department of Biology at Temple University. You can also find him on Twitter, and on his short story blog. After nearly six years of researching population genetic structure … Continue reading

Posted in population genetics, software, STRUCTURE | Tagged | 2 Comments

What we're reading: Selective sweeps in HIV, and rates of molecular evolution in big plants

In the journals Leviyang S., 2013  Computational inference methods for selective sweeps arising in acute HIV infection. Genetics 194: 737–752. doi: 10.1534/genetics.113.150862. HIV escape from CTL [cytotoxic T-lymphocyte] response forms a complex, selective sweep that is difficult to analyze. In … Continue reading

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#Evol2013: Home from Snowbird

On balance, Snowbird, Utah was a pretty great place to hang out with a whole bunch of biologists for five days. This was my sixth Evolution meeting, and I think it was the first one where I’d just about entirely … Continue reading

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