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Category Archives: selection
A race to the bottom with a new card from the coevolutionary deck
I’m a sucker for a clever, amusing title, though I’ve recently read that amusing titles are cited less (see here). Alas, maybe a well placed metaphor can enliven a manuscript and also not get lost in a citation-less abyss? In basic … Continue reading
Posted in Coevolution, evolution, horizontal gene transfer, microbiology, selection
Tagged Black Queen Hypothesis, co-evolution, microbes
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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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Anti-predatory adaptations in sticklebacks and butterflies
Two recent studies analyze character shifts in response to different selection regimes – (1) Mullerian mimicry wing patterns in Heliconius butterflies, and (2) anti-intraguild-predator adaptations in armor and shape of threespine sticklebacks. Hoyal Cuthill and Charleston 2015 Wing patterning genes … Continue reading
Genomics of domestication in chicken and cattle
Two recent studies attempt to understand the process of adaptive evolution in domestication and artificial selection by characterizing (a) sweeps, and their association with phenotypes in extant hybrid lines (Sheng et al. 2015), and (b) phylogenomic position of an extinct … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, domestication, evolution, genomics, natural history, Paleogenomics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection, speciation, STRUCTURE
Tagged domestication, ecological speciation, Evolution, hybridization, natural selection, population genetics, population structure
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On background selection in Ficedula flycatchers
Several recent studies (including those I wrote about last week) use genome-wide scans of differentiation to understand evolutionary mechanisms behind high or low divergence. However, there has been contentious support for and against these differentiation islands being due to differential … Continue reading
Introgression history in sticklebacks and oaks
Speciation theory has many monikers for differential gene flow – migration, introgression, admixture, hybridization, secondary contact. As a homogenizing process, gene flow at large acts to reduce differentiation between populations post-divergence. However, selection and demography affect the rates of gene … Continue reading
Sweptaway – Part 3 – Adaptation genomics of White Sands Lizards
Recent colonization events offer juicy insights into the adaptive evolution of species in response to natural selection of novel habitats – however, they are confounded by demographic changes (eg. bottlenecks, differential migration). In a recent study, Laurent et al. (2015) … Continue reading