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Author Archives: Jeremy Yoder
Want to see us in your Facebook News Feed? You should probably do this one weird thing.
A whole lot of folks—875!—have “liked” the Molecular Ecologist page on Facebook, which ought to mean that all those people see new posts from the site right in their Facebook News Feed. But we’ve found that our Facebook posts are … Continue reading
Posted in housekeeping, technical
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Crowd-sourcing natural history
What I think of as my first “real” science job was a year I spent in Pittsburgh, interning for the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. One of my most enjoyable duties was assisting a WPC ecologist on systematic surveys of plant diversity … Continue reading
Posted in citizen science, community, methods
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What we're reading: Arabidopsis vs slugs, the long reach of a GWAS hit, and post-pub peer review comes into its own?
In the journals Falk, K. L., J. Kästner, N. Bodenhausen, K. Schramm, C. Paetz, D. G. Vassão, M. Reichelt, D. von Knorre, J. Bergelson, M. Erb, J. Gershenzon, and S. Meldau. 2013. The role of glucosinolates and the jasmonic acid … Continue reading
The broom of the system: Tracking soft selective sweeps in bacteria colonizing the gut
A growing body of population genetic evidence suggests that adaptive evolutionary change often proceeds via soft selective sweeps, in which beneficial mutations on multiple genetic backgrounds—and potentially at multiple loci—all increase in frequency, but none achieve fixation. This process has … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, microbiology, population genetics
Tagged E coli, gut microbiota, mouse
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What we're reading: A single gene for Batesian mimicry, the genetics of interspecies incompatibility, and further debate over data sharing
In the journals Kunte K., W. Zhang, A. Tenger-Trolander, D. H. Palmer, A. Martin, R. D. Reed, S. P. Mullen, and M. R. Kronforst. 2014. doublesex is a mimicry supergene. Nature. doi: 10.1038/nature13112. Using an integrative approach combining genetic and … Continue reading
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What we're reading: Sex and the single endogenous retrovirus, extinction by hybridization, and the PLOS data-sharing policy
In the journals Jalasvuori M & J Lehtonen. 2014. Virus epidemics can lead to a population-wide spread of intragenomic parasites in a previously parasite-free asexual population. Molecular Ecology. 23(5):987–991. doi: 10.1111/mec.12662. Endogenous retroviruses are retroviruses that have integrated to the … Continue reading
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What's more isolating—environmental distance or … plain old distance?
We molecular ecologists spend a lot of time thinking about how we can differentiate the effects of natural selection acting on populations in different environments—local adaptation—from the simple isolating effects of, well, being in different places—isolation-by-distance. There’s a considerable literature … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, population genetics
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What we're reading: estimating relatedness and inbreeding, the evolution of influenza, and a new spin on p-values
In the journals Wang J. 2014. Marker-based estimates of relatedness and inbreeding coefficients: an assessment of current methods. J. Evol. Biol. 27:518–530. doi: 10.1111/jeb.12315. … F and r estimates can be misleading and become biased and marker dependent when a … Continue reading
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What we're reading: Phylogenetic analyses of diversification, how HIV crosses fitness valleys, and gorgeous science visualizations
In the journals Morlon, H. 2014. Phylogenetic approaches for studying diversification. Ecology Letters. doi: 10.1111/ele.12251. A major challenge ahead is to develop models that more explicitly take into account ecology, in particular the interaction of species with each other and … Continue reading
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