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Monthly Archives: October 2015
To the final estuaries
For the final stop on our Japanese sampling leg, we ventured to the most populous metropolitan area in the world. Tokyo was known as Edo (江戸), or estuary, until it became the imperial capital in 1868. An apt location to end our field expedition … Continue reading
Posted in blogging, domestication, evolution, haploid-diploid
Tagged Field work, Gracilaria, Japan, Tokyo
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Genomics of domestication in chicken and cattle
Two recent studies attempt to understand the process of adaptive evolution in domestication and artificial selection by characterizing (a) sweeps, and their association with phenotypes in extant hybrid lines (Sheng et al. 2015), and (b) phylogenomic position of an extinct … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, domestication, evolution, genomics, natural history, Paleogenomics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection, speciation, STRUCTURE
Tagged domestication, ecological speciation, Evolution, hybridization, natural selection, population genetics, population structure
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Three Views of Japan
By the time we reached Sendai, we were heading into our fourth week of sharing one tiny suitcase of clothes, while bags of silica were luxuriously spread across three large suitcases! Games of Jenga in the teeny rental cars were … Continue reading
Posted in blogging, community, evolution, haploid-diploid, natural history
Tagged 2015, Field work, Gracilaria, Japan, seaweed, Sendai
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Bigger, badder males drive unbalanced genetic introgression in wall lizards
Female mate choice is one of the major barriers to hybridization. But even when hybridization does happen, females are often identified as the primary drivers of how phenotypes move through a hybrid zone. A new paper appearing in Ecology Letters … Continue reading
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On false positives in Isolation with Migration analyses
The IM suite of tools (IM, IMa, IMa2, IMa2p, etc.) are used widely by molecular ecologists at large for the analyses and estimation of ancestral demography under an Isolation with Migration (IM) model. However, these tools come with fundamental assumptions … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, genomics, howto, IMa2, methods, Molecular Ecology views, natural history, population genetics, software, theory
Tagged Evolution, gene flow, genomics, IM, isolation with migration, methods, migration, population genetics
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Along the Mackerel Road
We left Hokkaido and flew to Osaka where we collected our next rental car (our first teeny tiny one!) As our flight was delayed due to weather in Hokkaido, we decided to break the journey between Osaka and Obama (it … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, blogging, community, haploid-diploid, natural history, population genetics, speciation
Tagged Gracilaria, Japan, Kamiya, sampling, seaweed, tourist sites, Ulva
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Genetic distance predicts the spread of deadly fungal infections in bats
You’ve probably heard about White-Nose Syndrome (WNS), the particularly nasty fungal pathogen that has decimated North American bat populations over the last decade. Not only has WNS been extremely deadly, but the speed at which it’s spread has been alarming. Really alarming: Understanding … Continue reading
Posted in Molecular Ecology, the journal, phylogeography, population genetics
Tagged pathogens, RADseq
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Machine learning for model selection in population genomics
The application of model-based methods in phylogeography helped the field transition from a more qualitative, overlay-a-tree-on-a-map, discipline to one that tests hypotheses in robust statistical frameworks. Many researchers have embraced approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) for model selection since computing the likelihood of … Continue reading
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On background selection in Ficedula flycatchers
Several recent studies (including those I wrote about last week) use genome-wide scans of differentiation to understand evolutionary mechanisms behind high or low divergence. However, there has been contentious support for and against these differentiation islands being due to differential … Continue reading
An unspoiled frontier
“An unspoiled frontier, an escape from industrialized Japan and a chance to connect with nature …” or so says the Rough Guide to Japan (6th edition, September 2014). We had experienced a bit of the city-scene in Hakodate, but the rest … Continue reading
Posted in blogging, conservation, evolution, natural history, population genetics
Tagged Field work, Gracilaria, Hokkaido, Japan
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