Author Archives: Jeremy Yoder

About Jeremy Yoder

Jeremy B. Yoder is an Associate Professor of Biology at California State University Northridge, studying the evolution and coevolution of interacting species, especially mutualists. He is a collaborator with the Joshua Tree Genome Project and the Queer in STEM study of LGBTQ experiences in scientific careers. He has written for the website of Scientific American, the LA Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Awl, and Slate.

Spontaneous mutations—friend or foe?

Posted on 16 Jun, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

The following is a cross-posting from the Stanford CEHG Blog by Ryo (Ryosuke) Kit, a graduate student in Hunter Fraser’s lab at Stanford University. Evolution has conflicting opinions about spontaneous mutations. Spontaneous mutations produce the genetic variation that drives evolution … Continue reading →

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What we're reading: Genetics of ecological speciation and translating plant genetics to the farm

Posted on 13 Jun, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

In the journals Arnegard M.E., M.D. McGee, B. Matthews, K.B. Marchinko, G.L. Conte, S. Kabir, N. Bedford, S. Bergek, Y.F. Chan, F.C. Jones, D.M. Kingsley, C.L. Peichel, D. Schluter. 2014. Genetics of ecological divergence during speciation. Nature doi: 10.1038/nature13301. Here … Continue reading →

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What we're reading: Population genetics of an invasive vine, demography and GWAS,

Posted on 6 Jun, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

In the journals Campitelli, B. E., and J. R. Stinchcombe. 2014. Population dynamics and evolutionary history of the weedy vine Ipomoea hederacea in North America. G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics, doi: 10.1534/g3.114.011700. We further found significant genetic differentiation at sequenced loci, … Continue reading →

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What we're reading: The evolution of brains versus brawn, ring species genomics, and the deadly fifth stage of publishing

Posted on 30 May, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

In the journals Bozek K, Wei Y, Yan Z, Liu X, Xiong J, et al. 2014. Exceptional evolutionary divergence of human muscle and brain metabolomes parallels human cognitive and physical uniqueness. PLoS Biology 12(5): e1001871. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001871. We found that … Continue reading →

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How A Troublesome Inheritance gets human genetics wrong

Posted on 29 May, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

Probably since before the origin of modern Homo sapiens, we have known that people from other places—the next village over, the other side of the mountains, or some distant and unexplored land—were different from us. Some of those differences were … Continue reading →

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What we're reading: The vital importance of mosquitoes' gut microbes, an app for classroom genetics, and how to fish for p-values without really trying

Posted on 23 May, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

In the journals Coon, K. L., K. J. Vogel, M. R. Brown, and M. R. Strand. 2014. Mosquitoes rely on their gut microbiota for development. Molecular Ecology. 2727–2739. doi: 10.1111/mec.12771. Functional assays showed that axenic larvae of each species failed … Continue reading →

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What we're reading: Dealing with missing sequence data, SNP2GO, and the challenge of replication in bad results

Posted on 9 May, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

In the journals Ferretti, L., E. Raineri, and S. Ramos-Onsins. 2012. Neutrality tests for sequences with missing data. Genetics 191:1397–401. doi: 10.1534/genetics.112.139949. At present, most packages for population genetics analyses like DNAsp (Librado and Rozas 2009) deal with missing data … Continue reading →

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Selection keeps an extra-close eye on multi-functional genes

Posted on 6 May, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

Genes that have roles in multiple traits—pleiotropic genes—have long been thought to be under stronger selection as a result of those multiple functions. The basic logic is that, when a gene produces a protein that has a lot of different … Continue reading →

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What we're reading: The Y chromosome, climate change versus forests, and a postdoc's job description

Posted on 2 May, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

In the journals Cortez, D., R. Marin, D. Toledo-Flores, L. Froidevaux, A. Liechti, P. D. Waters, F. Grützner, and H. Kaessmann. 2014. Origins and functional evolution of Y chromosomes across mammals. Nature 508:488–93. doi: 10.1038/nature13151. Despite expression decreases in therians, … Continue reading →

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What we're reading: Tradeoffs in a songbird pathogen, new coalescent models, and the value of museum collections

Posted on 25 Apr, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

In the journals Williams PD, AP Dobson, KV Dhondt, DM Hawley, and AA Dhondt. 2014. Evidence of trade-offs shaping virulence evolution in an emerging wildlife pathogen. Journal of Evolutionary Biology. doi: 10.1111/jeb.12379. Relationships between pathogen traits are also investigated, with … Continue reading →

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