Author Archives: Melissa DeBiasse

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?*

[We want to know what you think! Please click on the link at the bottom of the post to complete a short survey and/or share your thoughts about the publishing process in the comments section below] For better or worse, … Continue reading

Posted in career, funding, Impact Factors, peer review, science publishing | 1 Comment

Incorporating phenotype and genotype in model-based species delimitation

  Species are the fundamental unit of biology but identifying them is a challenging task that receives a lot of theoretical and empirical attention. In a recent Evolution paper, Solís‐Lemus et al. (2015) introduce a new model-based method that integrates phenotypic and genetic data … Continue reading

Posted in methods, speciation, species delimitation, theory | 2 Comments

Nature versus nurture in the human immune system

An organism’s phenotype is the result of its genotype and its environment. Teasing apart the relative importance of these factors in determining phenotype is a difficult task. However, monozygotic (i.e. identical) twins offer a natural experiment to test the contributions of genes … Continue reading

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Linking gene expression and phenotype in an emerging model organism

Last week in his post “Transcriptomics in the wild (populations),” TME contributor Noah Snyder-Mackler focused on a recent paper by Alvarez et al. that reviews the last decade of transcriptomic research including the goal of linking gene expression and phenotype. Researchers today routinely collect transcriptomic data for non-model … Continue reading

Posted in genomics, howto, methods, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hybrid speciation is for the birds (and plants, reptiles, fish, and insects)

R. A. Fisher once called hybridization ‘‘the grossest blunder in sexual preference which we can conceive of an animal making.” While there may be negative fitness consequences for an individual who mates across species boundaries, the evolutionary significance of hybridization in speciation, introgression, … Continue reading

Posted in population genetics, speciation | Tagged | 2 Comments

LSUMNS researchers are at the top of the list for new species discoveries in 2014

2014 was an exciting year for describing new biodiversity for researchers at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science (LSUMNS). Top ten lists are ubiquitous this time of year and two such lists documenting the top new species of 2014 … Continue reading

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Et tu, Brute? Black-legged ticks use genes co-opted from bacteria to fight bacterial infection

Horizontal gene transfer occurs when genes are passed between individuals by mechanisms other than reproduction. It is common in bacteria and occasionally happens between highly divergent groups (for example, monocot genes transferred to eudicots, fungal genes transferred to aphids, bacterial genes transferred … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, genomics, horizontal gene transfer, microbiology | Leave a comment

Compensatory evolution: a possible mechanism of population divergence

After spending my graduate career using genetic data to reconstruct historical demographic events, one of the things that excite me the most about my postdoc work is the opportunity to use experimental methods to make evolution happen (insert mad scientist laugh … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, genomics, mutation, yeast | 3 Comments

All in the family: hierarchical social and genetic structure in the Old World monkey Theropithecus gelada

Complex, multi-level animal societies have evolved convergently across many taxa but we know little about the mechanisms behind their formation and their associated fitness benefits. In their Molecular Ecology paper published online last week, Snyder-Mackler et al. addressed these questions … Continue reading

Posted in community, Molecular Ecology, the journal, primates, societal structure | 2 Comments

Here, kitty, kitty. The cat genome sheds light on feline evolution and domestication

Although this kitten looks fierce, Montague et al. recently uncovered the genes responsible for the taming of the house cat, Felis silvestris catus, which coincided with the development of agriculture about 10,00 years ago. Grain crops attracted rodents into human … Continue reading

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