Tag Archives: genomics

Old dogs, and 'carnivorous' pandas

It was a good fortnight for large mammals! Two recent studies attempt to date the emergence of modern canids, and offer insights into the gut microbiomes of giant pandas. Ancient Wolf Genome Reveals an Early Divergence of Domestic Dog Ancestors and … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, metagenomics, microbiology, natural history, Paleogenomics, population genetics, speciation | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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 , , , | 1 Comment

Genomic diversity and secondary contact

Under a divergence, or isolation model, the genomes of individuals in a daughter-population are expected to harbor greater differentiation relative to its sister-population, and lower differentiation within the population (after sufficient time since divergence). Divergence thus is a mechanism of … Continue reading

Posted in evolution, genomics, next generation sequencing, population genetics, theory | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Rooting eukaryotes in the Arctic Ocean

While the general consensus has centered around the evolution of eukaryotes within the TACK superphylum of Archaea (Thaum-, Aigar-, Cren-, and Kor-archaeota), considerable controversy yet remains with (a) the rooting of the eukaryote common ancestor, and (b) ‘missing’ links in … Continue reading

Posted in evolution, metagenomics, speciation, species delimitation | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

When genomes duplicate

Whole genome duplication events have played an important role in the evolutionary history of plants. Vallejo-Marín et al. (2015) describe origins of a new polyploid species, Mimulus peregrines, found on the Scottish mainland as well as the Orkney Islands. It was formed within … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, natural history, plants | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Sous les mers: cradles or museums of biodiversity?

While thinking about environmental genomics and writing this post on a recent article in Heredity, I interviewed Eric Pante.

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, Coevolution, evolution, genomics, interview | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Quantifying risks of consanguineous mating in humans

The efficacy of selection in purging a deleterious mutation from a randomly mating population depends on numerous factors, including dominance effects of alleles – see my previous posts. Simplistically, most new mutations are expected to be heterozygotic, and be purged … Continue reading

Posted in genomics, mutation, pedigree, population genetics, selection, societal structure | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Procrustes Analyses in R

Procrustes transformations (i.e. a form of multidimensional scaling that allows the comparison of two data sets) have been used extensively in recent literature to assess the similarity of geographical and genetic distributions of species, following the lead of Wang et … Continue reading

Posted in genomics, howto, population genetics, R, software | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

The brave new world of environmental genomics

A new special issue of Heredity reflects on the recent advances in environmental genomics (see other posts about eDNA here and here) and highlights the ways NGS can aid in characterizing complex biological systems. The cryptic, as well as the rare but active … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, Coevolution, DNA barcoding, evolution, genomics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

dN(eutralist) < dS(electionist) Part 5

The neutral theory predicts that species with small census (and effective) population sizes are subject to greater drift (or allele frequency fluctuations), and vice versa. In other words, species with larger population sizes are expected to maintain more neutral diversity … Continue reading

Posted in evolution, mutation, natural history, plants, population genetics, theory | Tagged , , | Leave a comment