Monthly Archives: July 2015

PCA of multilocus genotypes in R

An earlier post from Mark Christie showed up on my feed on calculating allele frequencies from genotypic data in R, and I wanted to put together a quick tutorial on making PCA (Principal Components Analysis) plots using genotypes. I used … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, genomics, howto, population genetics, R, software | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

When and how to "go for the genes"

A new special issue of Molecular Ecology, entitled “Detecting selection in natural populations: making sense of genome scans and towards alternative solutions”, is coming down the line, and a few articles from that issue are starting to appear as newly-accepted. Seeing those … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, association genetics, Molecular Ecology, the journal | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Tao of open science for ecology

I think we can all agree that science needs to be transparent, shared, and reproducible. Recently, however, the discussion about “open science” has been conducted mostly in online forums and less so in publications (hopefully Open Access ones!). This is … Continue reading

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Current archival practices limit our ability to reuse genetic data

Archiving genetic data is important for a lot of reasons, like ensuring reproducibility and transparency of results. Being able to access previously published data is also important given that the same set of data can often help answer a diversity of … Continue reading

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Who came first – the Paleo- or Native American?

In yet another infamous Science vs Nature race, two studies published this Tuesday toss more cans of worms at the ongoing debate about the founding of the Americas – with disparate findings. Uh oh. Skoglund et al. Nature (2015) Genetic … Continue reading

Posted in genomics, next generation sequencing, Paleogenomics, population genetics | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Dozens of talks from the Evolution 2015 meetings are on YouTube

If, like me, you didn’t make it to the 2015 Evolution meetings — maybe the logistics of a trip to Brazil were beyond your financial and/or temporal means — you can make up for it with the big cache of … Continue reading

Posted in community, conferences, phylogeography, population genetics | Tagged | 3 Comments

Dispersal and the rainbow trout takeover

I’m going to keep rolling on the dispersal theme from last week and share a new paper by Ryan Kovach and colleagues that demonstrates the balance between dispersal and selection. Specifically, the authors show that this balance dictates the hybridization … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

What do with all those pesky mtDNA reads in your NGS experiment

Have you ever noticed how many reads from your high throughput sequencing project map to the tiny fraction of your genome that is the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA)? Pretty much any NGS experiment (e.g., RNA-seq, DNA-seq, capture-based sequencing) leave you with … Continue reading

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IMa2p – Parallel Isolation with Migration Analyses

I figured that it was time to write an update on my post from a year ago on Bayesian MCMC in inferring ancestral demography. Recently, my postdoctoral advisor, Jody Hey and I released a version of the popular IMa2 program, … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, genomics, howto, software, theory | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Dispersal by land or by sea

Here, we compare and contrast the traits and selective forces influencing the evolution of dispersal in marine and terrestrial systems. From this comparison, a unifying question emerges: when is dispersal for dispersal and when is dispersal a by-product of selection … Continue reading

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