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Category Archives: mutation
Catching evolution in the act with the Singleton Density Score
A recent study led by Jonathan K. Pritchard at Stanford University brought a media storm with catchy headlines in both of the flagship scientific outlets Nature and Science News. Aside from highlighting the question of preprints without peer review being … Continue reading
Posted in methods, mutation, population genetics, selection
Tagged human evolution, methods, SDS, selection
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What does the island fox say?
Small populations are characterized by large drift and reduced efficacy of selection effects, which result in fixation of both advantageous and deleterious alleles, accumulation of homozygosity, and often reduction in population fitness. What with plummeting mammal populations across biota, understanding … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, mutation, natural history, population genetics, selection
Tagged Evolution, genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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A different perspective on genetic architecture
As an ecological geneticist, I’m constantly reminded how much we don’t understand about the genetic nature of adaptive variation. Sure, we have lots of examples of genes/pathways/regions that seem to be responsible for adaptation, but we don’t really know if … Continue reading
An evolutionary cycle …
Rescan, Lenormand and Roze (2016) recently published new models on the evolution of life cycles in The American Naturalist. Most animals and protists have diploid life cycles in which the haploid stage is reduced to a single-celled gamete. Other organisms, such … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, haploid-diploid, mutation, selection, transcriptomics
Tagged Evolution, haploid-diploid, life cycle, models, selection
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Sweptaway – Part 1
Brace yourselves for a series of new posts on selection, especially with articles from the special Molecular Ecology issue on “Detecting selection in natural populations: making sense of genome scans and towards alternative solutions” starting to roll out! Selective sweeps … Continue reading
Selection scans, and the genomics of adaptive/maladaptive introgression
Natural selection, and the adaptive evolution of hybrid reproductive incompatibilities post divergence are known to be major drivers of speciation. At the phenotype level, these manifest as fitness differences between introgressing populations. At the genomic level, speciation “genes” or “islands” … Continue reading
What do with all those pesky mtDNA reads in your NGS experiment
Have you ever noticed how many reads from your high throughput sequencing project map to the tiny fraction of your genome that is the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA)? Pretty much any NGS experiment (e.g., RNA-seq, DNA-seq, capture-based sequencing) leave you with … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, genomics, howto, mutation, software, Uncategorized
Tagged mitochondria, mtDNA
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Sexual selection and population fitness
Sexual selection or non-random mate choice acts to ‘filter’ out less competitive/desirable phenotypes from a population. In the presence of small effect mutation loads, i.e. small fitness differences between a mutation-free population, and one with persistent deleterious mutations, sexual selection … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, mutation, population genetics
Tagged ecological speciation, genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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