Category Archives: howto

Applying for faculty jobs is a full-time job – The 'workload'

As a postdoc in the last year of her funding, I’ve spent the last year applying for tenure-track faculty jobs. I’m not ready to talk about the outcome yet, but I do want to talk about the process and what … Continue reading

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#StudentSciComm

I just submitted my four year review and in so doing listed out the students that had published blogs on The Molecular Ecologist. Seventeen students have not only received course credit, but also have a non-peer reviewed publication on their … Continue reading

Posted in blogging, career, chat, community, ecology, evolution, howto, methods, Molecular Ecology, the journal, Science Communication, science publishing | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Simple Gantt charts in R with ggplot2 … and Microsoft Excel

making Gantt charts is a form of self-care — Colin J. Carlson (@ColinJCarlson) November 26, 2018 If you’ve ever had to explain how all the elements of a big, multi-part project come together, you’ve probably at least considered making something … Continue reading

Posted in funding, howto | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Not my problem

Do American scientists know that doing research in America is a necessary step for many scientists from other parts of the world in order to get a permanent job in academia in their home country? Once in the US, these … Continue reading

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500 Queer Scientists

When I heard the first time about 500 Queer Scientists (@QueerSci, #QueerSTEM) I thought for myself ‘Why do we need to support STEM scientists based on their sexual orientation?’. This is how ignorant and clumsy I am. We got sensitized … Continue reading

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Best practices in sample naming

Wherein I try to save me from myself Let’s imagine a young scientist, bursting to the seems with enthusiasm and schemes to uncover the secrets of the biological world. Everything is new and she learns as she goes! Let’s call … Continue reading

Posted in data archiving, fieldwork, howto, methods | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Molecular ecology, the flowchart

Update: You can now buy a poster print of the Flowchart, with proceeds going to support The Molecular Ecologist! Towards the end of last semester my department’s evolutionary genetics journal club read Rasmus Nielsen’s terrific 2005 review of tests for … Continue reading

Posted in association genetics, bioinformatics, genomics, howto, infographic, linkage mapping, next generation sequencing, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection | 2 Comments

Phylogenetic trees in R using ggtree

Recently, one R package which I like to use for visualizing phylogenetic trees got published. It’s called ggtree, and as you might guess from the name it is based on the popular ggplot2 package. With ggtree, plotting trees in R has … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, howto, phylogenetics, R | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Handling microbial contamination in NGS data

Until recently, I had given little thought to the potential for unwanted microbial contamination in high throughput sequence data. I suspect that if you’re a molecular ecologist who doesn’t primarily study microbes or work with ancient DNA, you’re in a … Continue reading

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Unbalanced population sampling and STRUCTURE

The utility and intuition offered by the program STRUCTURE, and more generally, the ‘admixture’ model of Pritchard et al. (2000) are unquestioned – with tens of thousands of citations, it retains its lead among the most popular population genetics software. … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, genomics, howto, methods, population genetics, software, STRUCTURE | Tagged , , | 1 Comment