Category Archives: genomics

When genomes duplicate

Posted on 8 May, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Whole genome duplication events have played an important role in the evolutionary history of plants. Vallejo-Marín et al. (2015) describe origins of a new polyploid species, Mimulus peregrines, found on the Scottish mainland as well as the Orkney Islands. It was formed within … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, natural history, plants | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Gene flow and Population Fitness

Posted on 7 May, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

Fitness effects of gene flow (both advantageous and deleterious) have garnered plenty of recent press and scientific exploration. At the population level, the concepts and consequences are notoriously familiar. In the context of immigration, they reduce to existing genetic variation, … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, natural history, population genetics, selection, speciation, theory | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Sous les mers: cradles or museums of biodiversity?

Posted on 2 May, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

While thinking about environmental genomics and writing this post on a recent article in Heredity, I interviewed Eric Pante.

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Grasping gorgonians

Posted on 1 May, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

A recent issue of Heredity focused on the brave new world of environmental genomics. After highlighting the special issue, I started chatting to one of the contributors, Eric Pante and became interested in his work on gorgonians. Eric and his co-authors explored the … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, Coevolution, evolution, genomics, mutation, phylogenetics | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Quantifying risks of consanguineous mating in humans

Posted on 30 Apr, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

The efficacy of selection in purging a deleterious mutation from a randomly mating population depends on numerous factors, including dominance effects of alleles – see my previous posts. Simplistically, most new mutations are expected to be heterozygotic, and be purged … Continue reading →

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A mammoth bottleneck prior to extinction

Posted on 28 Apr, 2015 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

Here’s to back-to-back posts on extinct mammalian genomes! Woolly mammoth genomes are all the rage. How do I know? Just check out the new book, pre-print, and paper that were recently published.

Posted in conservation, genomics, next generation sequencing, Paleogenomics, population genetics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Extinct and extant Equus genomes reveal speciation with gene flow despite chromosome number variation

Posted on 27 Apr, 2015 by Melissa DeBiasse

In their recent PNAS paper*, Hákon et al. generate full genome sequence data for each living species of asses and zebras, thus completing the set of genomes available for all extant species in the genus Equus (genomes for the donkey and … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, speciation | 1 Comment

Procrustes Analyses in R

Posted on 23 Apr, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

Procrustes transformations (i.e. a form of multidimensional scaling that allows the comparison of two data sets) have been used extensively in recent literature to assess the similarity of geographical and genetic distributions of species, following the lead of Wang et … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, howto, population genetics, R, software | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Adaptive divergence in the monkey flower

Posted on 20 Apr, 2015 by Melissa DeBiasse

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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The brave new world of environmental genomics

Posted on 17 Apr, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

A new special issue of Heredity reflects on the recent advances in environmental genomics (see other posts about eDNA here and here) and highlights the ways NGS can aid in characterizing complex biological systems. The cryptic, as well as the rare but active … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, Coevolution, DNA barcoding, evolution, genomics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment