Subscribe by email
Join 877 other subscribersMeta
Author Archives: Rob Denton
Genetic distance predicts the spread of deadly fungal infections in bats
You’ve probably heard about White-Nose Syndrome (WNS), the particularly nasty fungal pathogen that has decimated North American bat populations over the last decade. Not only has WNS been extremely deadly, but the speed at which it’s spread has been alarming. Really alarming: Understanding … Continue reading
Posted in Molecular Ecology, the journal, phylogeography, population genetics
Tagged pathogens, RADseq
Leave a comment
Paternity matters in polyploid plants
In the most basic definition, polyploidy is a numerical increase in whole chromosome number. The effects of this increase in genomic material often produce novel morphologies compared to parental species, and polyploids have become both a huge part of explaining the … Continue reading
Landscape genetics shows that Tanzanian forest monkeys feel the heat of human influence
A new publication appearing in Heredity applies new methods for associating population genetic data with landscape resistance to an tropical, endangered species. The authors utilize multiple measurements of landscape resistance, like forest cover and distance from the nearest village, to select the … Continue reading
Picking the ripest model with PHRAPL
To study patterns of genetic variation is to consider scale. The choices an investigator makes when designing a study can produce such a beautiful breadth of evolutionary patterns: from populations to species, from local to continental, from ancient to contemporary. The fields that … Continue reading
Environmental association analyses: a practical guide for a practical guide
Obtaining extensive SNP data for your organism of choice isn’t such a feat these days, but actually matching that breadth of data with appropriate analyses is still a challenge. Fortunately, there has been an avalanche of new methods to make … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, association genetics, methods, Molecular Ecology, the journal
Tagged landscape genetics
1 Comment
The unforeseen genomic consequences of domestication
When a desired genome is selected for propagation, all mutations, beneficial, neutral, or deleterious, shift in frequency, and this sometimes can have unforeseen consequences. Natural selection takes the good with the bad. Beneficial and harmful mutations combine to provide a net … Continue reading
Posted in domestication, genomics, plants, selection, transcriptomics
Tagged mutation, sunflowers
Leave a comment
Fossils and phylogenetics meet in the evolutionary middle
…if evolutionary biologists are intent on documenting the history of life, we need methods that can at least approximate patterns of evolution in deep time for clades without fossil information. A scientists who wants to understand the evolutionary history of … Continue reading
Models matter when linking genetic diversity to niche model predictions
Ecological niche models and the methods to create them continue to evolve. These techniques provide a tidy way to relate the distributions of taxa to environmental variables from the present, past, or future. Oh, and they are pretty too: Those pretty … Continue reading
Should we use Mantel tests in molecular ecology?
No. Stop. At least that is the message from a new publication in Methods in Ecology and Evolution by Pierre Legendre and colleagues (pay-walled, but I found a pdf here). Mantel tests should simply not be used to test hypotheses … Continue reading