Monthly Archives: April 2015

A few good molecular ecologists: six months and 116 posts later

Posted on 30 Apr, 2015 by Rob Denton

My usual Wednesday spot on The Molecular Ecologist is primetime real estate: a lot of journal table-of-contents get sent out on Tuesday/Wednesday and whole slew of people are in the office looking at computer screens. This usually produces a nice readership on Wednesdays, … Continue reading →

Posted in blogging, Molecular Ecology views, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Quantifying risks of consanguineous mating in humans

Posted on 30 Apr, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

The efficacy of selection in purging a deleterious mutation from a randomly mating population depends on numerous factors, including dominance effects of alleles – see my previous posts. Simplistically, most new mutations are expected to be heterozygotic, and be purged … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, mutation, pedigree, population genetics, selection, societal structure | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A mammoth bottleneck prior to extinction

Posted on 28 Apr, 2015 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

Here’s to back-to-back posts on extinct mammalian genomes! Woolly mammoth genomes are all the rage. How do I know? Just check out the new book, pre-print, and paper that were recently published.

Posted in conservation, genomics, next generation sequencing, Paleogenomics, population genetics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Extinct and extant Equus genomes reveal speciation with gene flow despite chromosome number variation

Posted on 27 Apr, 2015 by Melissa DeBiasse

In their recent PNAS paper*, Hákon et al. generate full genome sequence data for each living species of asses and zebras, thus completing the set of genomes available for all extant species in the genus Equus (genomes for the donkey and … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, speciation | 1 Comment

Clonal conundrum, part deux

Posted on 24 Apr, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

In the second installment of the clonal conundrum, one hallmark of clonality is one that surprisingly hasn’t been validated that many times using species that have both sexually and asexually reproducing populations. Theoretically, clonal reproduction should generate massive … Heterozygote excess … Continue reading →

Posted in conservation, DNA barcoding, domestication, evolution, haploid-diploid, population genetics | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Procrustes Analyses in R

Posted on 23 Apr, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

Procrustes transformations (i.e. a form of multidimensional scaling that allows the comparison of two data sets) have been used extensively in recent literature to assess the similarity of geographical and genetic distributions of species, following the lead of Wang et … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, howto, population genetics, R, software | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Interview: The landscape of Ian Wang's reading list

Posted on 22 Apr, 2015 by Rob Denton

To follow up on some recent posts on The Molecular Ecologist about landscape genetics and isolation by environment, I brought in an expert. Dr. Ian Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Environment Science, Policy, and Management at … Continue reading →

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Adaptive divergence in the monkey flower

Posted on 20 Apr, 2015 by Melissa DeBiasse

Theory suggests adaptive divergence can proceed in the face of gene flow when adaptive alleles occur in areas of the genome, such as chromosomal inversions, that are protected from recombination, which can break up beneficial allele pairings. In their recent Evolution paper, … Continue reading →

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Clonal conundrum, part un

Posted on 19 Apr, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Molecular ecologists are faced with a clonal conundrum when we wish to investigate the evolutionary ecology of clonal organisms. An attack of the clones is not something that should frighten one away …

Posted in Coevolution, community ecology, conservation, domestication, evolution, haploid-diploid, natural history, population genetics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The brave new world of environmental genomics

Posted on 17 Apr, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

A new special issue of Heredity reflects on the recent advances in environmental genomics (see other posts about eDNA here and here) and highlights the ways NGS can aid in characterizing complex biological systems. The cryptic, as well as the rare but active … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, Coevolution, DNA barcoding, evolution, genomics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment