Category Archives: population genetics

Caught in the act: how drug-resistance mutations sweep through populations of HIV

Posted on 28 Jan, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

The following guest post by Meredith L. Carpenter is cross-posted from the CEHG blog at Stanford, and it describes recent work by Pleuni Pennings, who was featured in last week’s interview. Enjoy! It has been over 30 years since the … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, medicine, population genetics | 3 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

How prevalent are non-overlapping generations?

Posted on 17 Dec, 2013 by kimgilbert

Recently, the question of how prevalent in nature are truly non-overlapping generations has piqued my interest. There are many methodologies which make the assumption that generations are non-overlapping. Or in other cases, it is a simplification we may make to … Continue reading →

Posted in community, population genetics, quantitative genetics, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Molecular ecology views: Metapopulation dynamics from lab flasks to tidal pools

Posted on 22 Oct, 2013 by Jeremy Yoder

Our co-blogger Peter Fields is joining the lab of Dieter Ebert at the University of Basel this fall, and he sent along these photos of the Ebert group’s long-term work on the metapopulation dynamics of parasite infection in Daphina water … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, Molecular Ecology views, population genetics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Random drift and phenotypic evolution

Posted on 15 Oct, 2013 by peterfields

This week we have a guest post from Markku Karhunen. Markku’s research at the University of Helsinki included the development and implementation of a number of very interesting and useful population genetics methods. In his guest post Markku discusses these … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, methods, population genetics, quantitative genetics, R, software, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

For viruses, ecology shapes the speed of evolutionary change

Posted on 17 Sep, 2013 by Jeremy Yoder

Molecular ecologists are interested in understanding what patterns in genetic variation across and among populations can tell us about the ecology of the living things we study. But a paper published in the latest issue of The American Naturalist demonstrates … Continue reading →

Posted in population genetics, theory | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Using R to run parallel analyses of population genetic data in STRUCTURE: ParallelStructure

Posted on 3 Sep, 2013 by Jeremy Yoder

In this guest post, Francois Besnier explains how to use ParallelStructure, his new R package for running STRUCTURE analyses in parallel computing environments. To start with, thanks to The Molecular Ecologist blog team (Tim and Jeremy) for the invitation to … Continue reading →

Posted in howto, population genetics, R, software, STRUCTURE | 5 Comments

Want to share your code?

Posted on 27 Aug, 2013 by kimgilbert

In this line of work, we have all encountered tasks that are tedious, time consuming, and repetitive.  (Or if not, maybe give it a bit more time.) When confronted with these situations, people tend to fall into one of two … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, community, genomics, howto, methods, next generation sequencing, phylogenetics, population genetics, quantitative genetics, R, software, theory | 14 Comments

Domesticated genes gone wild

Posted on 14 Aug, 2013 by Jeremy Yoder

Artificial selection of domesticated plants and animals has been cited as a test case for natural selection since Charles Darwin first conceived the latter concept. But we generally consider that these two forms of selection operate to very different ends—that … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, domestication, population genetics | 4 Comments

Why do we care about population structure?

Posted on 9 Jul, 2013 by Jeremy Yoder

Arun Sethuraman is a postdoctoral associate with Jody Hey, studying statistical models for divergence population genetics in the Department of Biology at Temple University. You can also find him on Twitter, and on his short story blog. After nearly six years of researching population genetic structure … Continue reading →

Posted in population genetics, software, STRUCTURE | Tagged | 2 Comments