Author Archives: Melissa DeBiasse

Adaptive divergence in the monkey flower

Theory suggests adaptive divergence can proceed in the face of gene flow when adaptive alleles occur in areas of the genome, such as chromosomal inversions, that are protected from recombination, which can break up beneficial allele pairings. In their recent Evolution paper, … Continue reading

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Plastic and evolved responses to host fruit in apple maggot flies

The apple maggot fly, Rhagoletis pomonella, is a prominent system for the study of sympatric speciation. Sister taxa in the R. pomonella species complex, the apple-infesting race of R. pomonella and the snowberry-infesting R. zephyria, have sympatric distributions and the fruiting time of their preferred hosts widely overlaps. … Continue reading

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A transcriptomic approach for reduced representation in population genomics

                    Many population genomics studies use methods that provide a reduced representation of the genome, for example RADseq or UCEs. Targeting a subset of the genome reduces the cost of sequencing … Continue reading

Posted in genomics, howto, methods, Molecular Ecology, the journal, next generation sequencing, RNAseq | Leave a comment

A love letter to sponges

Like many kids interested in marine biology, growing up I wanted to work on sharks. After college I interned for a year at the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Lab under the guidance of two great mentors, Jim Gelsleichter and … Continue reading

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Just in time for spring break- the phylogenetic and medicinal history of Aloe vera

It’s spring break season across the United States, which means many undergraduates are shedding their winter layers and flocking to warm, tropical destinations. After a week of fun in the sun, I’m sure many of them will rely on  Aloe vera to soothe their sunburns. … Continue reading

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Speciation by selection (and drift) in the sea

Marine systems challenge the view that speciation is the result of geographic isolation. Many marine taxa have large effective population sizes, which slows lineage sorting, larval dispersal phases that may extend for days, weeks, and sometimes months, potentially connecting far flung populations, … Continue reading

Posted in genomics, next generation sequencing, selection, speciation | 1 Comment

Sometimes selection gives you more bang for your buck

Most species experience many environmental stressors simultaneously which means the direction and magnitude of evolutionary responses will depend on trade-offs between traits whose relationship may prevent them from being simultaneously optimized. Multiple sources of stress may act in opposing ways, for … Continue reading

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Coral conservation through assisted evolution

Coral reefs occupy a tiny portion of the world’s oceans (see map below) but their biodiversity is hugely disproportionate to their size. More than 450 million people from 109 countries live in close proximity to coral reefs and depend upon the … Continue reading

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The results are in for the journal selection survey

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about a recent paper by Salinas and Munch that presented a model-based method for determining to which journal an author should submit a manuscript for publication. I was curious to know how the readers … Continue reading

Posted in career, Impact Factors, methods, peer review, science publishing | 2 Comments

Breaking free of the guide tree: two new species delimitation methods

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a new method to incorporate morphology and DNA sequences into species delimitation. Including both data types improved the results but a couple of tricky spots remained: 1) correctly assigning individuals to putative species and 2) estimating … Continue reading

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