Category Archives: genomics

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 , | Leave a comment

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 , , , , | Leave a comment

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 , | Leave a comment

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 | Leave a comment

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

Posted in conservation, demography, evolution, genomics, mammals, population genetics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Can small populations benefit 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

Posted in conservation, genomics, mammals, mutation, population genetics, theory | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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

Posted in community ecology, evolution, genomics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Genetic Rescue – Fitness and genomic consequences

As a PhD student studying the effects of genetic diversity overall and immunogenetic diversity specifically on survival and reproductive success in an endangered primate in captive and wild populations, I thought a lot about the potential effects of inbreeding and … Continue reading

Posted in conservation, genomics, hybridization | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A genomic march of the penguins

It’s undeniable that penguins are a marine representative of the charismatic megafauna group. I have an affinity for stuff we need microscopes to see, BUT I agree that penguins are cute (just LOOK at these National Geographic photos…they’re even in … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, association genetics, bioinformatics, birds, ecology, evolution, genomics, phylogeography | Leave a comment