Category Archives: genomics

You can evolve there from here. And from here. And here …

Posted on 19 Aug, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

If evolutionary history somehow reverted back to the “warm little pond” in which life began, and started over from almost-scratch, would the re-diversification of life end up, four billion years later, pretty much as we see it today? I think … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, genomics, population genetics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

How many genes does it take to make a new species?

Posted on 5 Aug, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

Three-spined sticklebacks are speciation machines. When retreating glaciers exposed lakes and rivers around the coasts of northern North America and Eurasia, these armor-plated little fish colonized the new freshwater habitats from the ocean, and adapted to the threats and resources … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, population genetics, quantitative genetics, speciation | Tagged , | 5 Comments

How A Troublesome Inheritance gets human genetics wrong

Posted on 29 May, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

Probably since before the origin of modern Homo sapiens, we have known that people from other places—the next village over, the other side of the mountains, or some distant and unexplored land—were different from us. Some of those differences were … Continue reading →

Posted in book review, genomics, population genetics | Tagged , , | 19 Comments

Selection keeps an extra-close eye on multi-functional genes

Posted on 6 May, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

Genes that have roles in multiple traits—pleiotropic genes—have long been thought to be under stronger selection as a result of those multiple functions. The basic logic is that, when a gene produces a protein that has a lot of different … Continue reading →

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

Scanning the genome for local adaptation

Posted on 23 Apr, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

One of the most obvious and important applications of evolutionary genetics is in figuring out whether natural biological communities are going to be able to adapt to global climate change. The projected rate of climate change over then next century … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, association genetics, genomics, next generation sequencing | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Identifying and quantifying fitness effects across loci

Posted on 17 Apr, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

The following guest post by Ethan Jewett is cross-posted from the is cross-posted from the CEHG blog at Stanford. Enjoy! The degree to which similarities and differences among species are the result of natural selection, rather than genetic drift, is … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, genomics, population genetics, theory | 1 Comment

On “triangulation” in genome scans

Posted on 4 Feb, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

Guest contributor K.E. Lotterhos is a marine biologist at Wake Forest University, who studies evolutionary responses to fishing and climate change. You can find her on Twitter under the handle @dr_k_lo. A major goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the genetic … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, association genetics, genomics, methods, population genetics, quantitative genetics | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

No reference genome? No problem! Demographic inference from genomic data in nonmodel insect populations

Posted on 19 Dec, 2013 by Jeremy Yoder

This guest article by Martin Sikora is cross-posted from the Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics blog at Stanford University. Reconstructing the demographic history of species and populations is one of the major goals of evolutionary genetics. Inferring the timing and … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, next generation sequencing, population genetics | 2 Comments

Sequencer to the stars

Posted on 5 Nov, 2013 by Jeremy Yoder

The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post. No single person is responsible for the revolution in genetic data collection that has reshaped biology over just a handful of decades, but if you had … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, book review, genomics | Leave a comment

Getting started with Ultra Conserved Elements

Posted on 1 Oct, 2013 by Nicholas Crawford

Cross posted on ngcrawford.com If you attended Evolution 2013, you probably heard quite a lot of chatter about ultra conserved elements. Essentially, ultra conserved elements (UCEs) are parts of the genome that are highly conserved between different species. Although UCEs … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, methods, phylogenetics | 1 Comment