Category Archives: genomics

#EntSoc14, a quick review

Posted on 20 Nov, 2014 by Arun Sethuraman

I have had a wonderful time at my first big bug conference – the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. Amid secretive (or not so secretive) break-out sessions to Voodoo Doughnuts, … Continue reading →

Posted in conferences, genomics, phylogenetics, population genetics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

From cats to rats: two studies on domestication and tameness

Posted on 18 Nov, 2014 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

Anyone who has ever read Charles Darwin is acutely aware of his fascination with domestication – particularly how he fancied fancy pigeons. Darwin drew on his domestication obsession while writing his book, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, association genetics, domestication, genomics, methods, next generation sequencing, phylogenetics, quantitative genetics | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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

Posted on 17 Nov, 2014 by Melissa DeBiasse

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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The forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of … reproductive isolation

Posted on 14 Nov, 2014 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Hybrid zones are often used as a window with which to gaze upon the evolutionary process (Barton and Hewitt 1989). With the advent of genomic tools, it is possible to detect the genomic signatures and the architecture underlying reproductive isolation. In … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, conservation, genomics, next generation sequencing, population genetics, speciation | 1 Comment

Bugs fighting bugs: the evolution of the arthropod immune system.

Posted on 11 Nov, 2014 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

Since the beginning of time, animals have needed to protect themselves from invaders. They primarily do so via their innate immune system, in which trained killer cells attack foreign pathogens – ranging from microscopic bacteria to macroscopic worms. While we … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, phylogenetics | 1 Comment

Highlights from the 2014 Ecological Genomics Symposium

Posted on 6 Nov, 2014 by Melissa DeBiasse

Ecological genomics is a rapidly growing field that aims to understand the genetic mechanisms responsible for the adaptive responses of organisms to their environment. I’m jumping into this area of research as a postdoc in the Kelly Lab at Louisiana … Continue reading →

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The Ust'-Ishim Genome

Posted on 6 Nov, 2014 by Arun Sethuraman

This year has been monumental in pulling together several interesting pieces in the human evolution out of Africa puzzle (Lazaridis et al., Ruiz-Linares et al., Skoglund et al., Huerta-Sanchez et al., Jeong et al., Pickrell et al., Raghavan et al., … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, mutation, Paleogenomics, population genetics | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

WTF (What's The Function?)

Posted on 4 Nov, 2014 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

Jay Shendure’s editorial, “Life after genetics”, points out that we, as geneticists, should shift our focus from variant-finding (e.g., GWAS) to understanding the functional implications of disease-associated variants: “We are in a period of rich discovery in human genetics and genomics. The … Continue reading →

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How many markers does it take to make a dataset "genomic"?

Posted on 9 Oct, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

A new paper in Ecology Letters by Matthew Fitzpatrick and Stephen Keller proposes to use some a class of statistical methods developed for understanding the distribution of species in different environments to understand the distribution of genetic variants in different … Continue reading →

Posted in association genetics, genomics, next generation sequencing, population genetics, software | 7 Comments

Fishing for genetic signals of adaptation

Posted on 17 Sep, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

One of the biggest promises of modern DNA sequencing methods is the ability to track the adaptation of living populations at a fine genetic scale, in essentially real time. It’s already been done in a number of experimental evolution systems: … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, association genetics, genomics | Tagged | 1 Comment