Author Archives: Melissa DeBiasse

Highlights from SICB 2017

The 2017 Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting was held in New Orleans* on January 4th – 8th. This was my first time at SICB and I was amazed at the diversity and number of talks- over 1900 presentations on … Continue reading

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Highlights from the Standalone Society of Systematic Biologists meeting – part 1

The 2017 standalone meeting of the Society of Systematic Biologists included expert-led debates on major issues in molecular systematics. Didn’t make it to Baton Rouge? Don’t worry – Bryan McLean and I report on the main points below, and highlight some of our … Continue reading

Posted in phylogenetics, species delimitation, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Friday Action Item: Have a science conversation with a non-scientist

In the wake of the recent U.S. election, we’ve started these “Friday Action Item” posts with ideas about specific things you can do to support science — from calling Congress to helping crowd-fund a cool new research project. Got a … Continue reading

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Live from #Evol2016 – highlights from Saturday and what to see on Sunday June 19th

The Molecular Ecologist team is all over this year’s Evolution meeting in Austin, Texas. As part of our coverage of the meeting, we will be previewing presentations we’re excited about and recapping the highlights of each day here on the … Continue reading

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Live from #Evol2016 – Saturday June 18th

The Molecular Ecologist team is all over this year’s Evolution meeting in Austin, Texas. You can find all of the TME contributors on Twitter using the sidebar on the right or compiled in a handy Twitter list here. Follow along … Continue reading

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Top three of 2015 – Melissa DeBiasse

Following Rob’s lead, today I am sharing my top 3 posts of 2015 based on the number of pageviews they received. I’m also throwing in one of the posts I had the most fun researching and writing. Thank you to all … Continue reading

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Who belongs at the root of the animal tree?

Resolving the tree of life is a consequential goal of evolutionary biology and over the last several years there has been much research devoted to determining the relationships among the earliest branching animal lineages. As a scientist who studies sponges and cnidarians … Continue reading

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The next, next generation: long reads facilitate assembly & annotation in large genome species

The typical procedure for constructing a draft genome or transcriptome using current second generation, high throughput sequencing platforms involves generating short reads about 150 base pairs long, assembling those short reads into larger contigs, putting the contigs in the correct order to create … Continue reading

Posted in genomics, next generation sequencing, plants, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Conservation through hybridization

                      Human actions have contributed to an unprecedented increase in atmospheric CO2 in the last 250 years, and global temperatures will increase by as many as 4°C by the end … Continue reading

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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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