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Category Archives: genomics
A paleogenomic peek into the human history of the Americas — and all its complications
The following is a guest post from Ellen Quinlan, a PhD Candidate in Biology at Wake Forest University. Ellen’s dissertation work studies the ecology and population genomics of altitudinal range limits in Andean trees. The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission … Continue reading
Evolution 2023: Highlights of evolution and ecological genetics at Albuquerque
Evolution is back, folks. That is, the 2023 joint annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution, held last week in Albuquerque, New Mexico, felt just about like its pre-pandemic self. The … Continue reading
Revealing the natural history of yeast
The following is a guest post by Matthew Vandermeulen, PhD, at the University at Buffalo. Matthew studies the regulation of responses to environmental variation; he is on Twitter as @mvandermeulen. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, baker’s and brewer’s yeast, may be one organism that could contend with dogs … Continue reading
Posted in domestication, ecology, evolution, genomics, microbiology, mini-review, yeast
Tagged Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast
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Recent reading: 29 April 2022
How is this month already almost over? Four weeks ago I was just starting to realize that an unexpected, astonishingly good flowering season for Joshua trees meant I needed to shoehorn in some fieldwork, eyeing the data analysis I needed … Continue reading
Posted in ecology, evolution, genomics, horizontal gene transfer, journal club, microbiology
Tagged cuckoo, host-parasite, human diversity, rhizobia, Richard Lewontin
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Recent reading: 21 Jan 2022
The period between semesters is supposed to be quiet. I’ve been mentally dumping things to do into this one — paper revisions, reviewing service, analysis of long-awaited new data, a first draft of a new grant, writing my (eek) application … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, ecology, evolution, genomics, howto, journal club
Tagged dispersal, mutualism
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Recent reading: 7 Jan 2022
It’s a new year, and while many of the challenges of 2020 and 2021 don’t show any sign of letting up, I’m trying to pick up some habits that fell by the wayside while I juggled fully online semesters and … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, howto, journal club
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How do you use genome-wide diversity in conservation?
Measuring how genome-wide diversity matters to threatened species has been a constant endeavor of conservation genetics, and still is in the era of genomics. But what should we do with the fact that it often do not correlate with IUCN Red List categories, a measure of species’ threat status? Continue reading
In the pipeline – Part 1: ‘Plan, plan, and plan some more’
So you’ve decided it’s time to finally get around to starting that sequencing project. But before you aimlessly leap into it and generate terabytes of sequencing data, just STOP. It’s far too tempting to rush into sequencing projects for a … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, howto, methods, population genetics, Uncategorized
Tagged assembly, bioinformatics, genetics, genomics, In the pipeline, population genetics, Sequencing
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Can small populations benefit from genetic rescue?
The core dogma of conservation biology is clear: small populations are bad for species’ persistence. If we observe a population of endangered vertebrates harboring abundant deleterious mutations but without any reduction in fitness, what is happening there? I would like … Continue reading
Ask GEVEs
Yikes. This year has been a doozy, and while we all know that the hand on the wall (if you have one of those old fashioned things) that strikes midnight on December 31st will not put out the dumpster fires … Continue reading