Category Archives: phylogenetics

The key to a productive ecosystem may be plant neighbors’ chemistry

One of the grand patterns across the diversity of flowering plants is that major groups of species are deeply united by shared chemistry, especially “secondary” biochemical products that don’t directly contribute to processes like photosynthesis, growth, and reproduction. Secondary compounds … Continue reading

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Revenge of the sex chromosomes

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Microbial mutualists parted ways with this host plant — multiple times

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One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes and Not a Single to Spare

What is the weight of a transcriptome? How about a thousand? Every day new sequencing machines are purring away, base pair by base pair, producing novel insights into the genomes of our favorite organisms. As technology improves, costs come down, and opportunities … Continue reading

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Beetles' diversity was driven by coevolution with plants — and a little help from some microbial friends

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Is taxonomy still relevant to innovative science?

Elise Keister wrote this post as a final project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Conservation Genetics course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Elise studies the impact of climate change on corals as a PhD student in Dr. Dustin Kemp’s lab. Elise … Continue reading

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Earth BioGenome: The launch of biology’s moonshot

The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence all currently described ~1.5 million eukaryotic species on earth (Lewin et al., 2018; Figure 1). The scale and scope are enormous, and it is hard to imagine a more ambitious but exciting goal. … Continue reading

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Conference catch-up: The many colors of snow

Red snow … watermelon snow … green snow … did you know that snow came in so many different colors? I had never heard of watermelon ice (#🍉❄) until a talk given by Robin Kodner from Western Washington University at … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, citizen science, community ecology, evolution, fieldwork, mating system, microbiology, natural history, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection, speciation, transcriptomics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Nick Fountain-Jones wins Harry Smith Prize for study of virus transmission among urban bobcats

The Harry Smith Prize is awarded for the best paper in Molecular Ecology in the previous year led by an early-career researcher. The 2018 Prize has been awarded to Dr. Nick Fountain-Jones for his paper ‘Urban landscapes can change virus gene flow and evolution … Continue reading

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Evolution 2018: assortative mating, combinatorial speciation and genome dynamics

The Evolution conference in Montpellier is over, and as the sun, wine and great science become a memory, here is my recap of some conference highlights following on from a great first day: Sharon Strauss (University of California Davis) gave … Continue reading

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