In the journals
Hedrick, PW. 2013. Adaptive introgression in animals: examples and
comparison to new mutation and standing variation as sources of adaptive variation. Molecular Ecology doi: 10.1111/mec.12415.
… potential examples of adaptive introgression in animals, including balancing selection for multiple alleles for major histocompatibility complex (MHC), S and csd genes, pesticide resistance in mice, black colour in wolves and white colour in coyotes, Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestry in humans, mimicry genes in Heliconius butterflies, beak traits in Darwin’s finches, yellow skin in chickens and non-native ancestry in an endangered native salamander, are examined.
(Hat-tip to Graham Coop for this one.)
Goudie F, MH Allsopp, and BP Oldroyd. 2013. Selection on overdominant genes maintains heterozygosity along multiple chromosomes in a clonal lineage of honey bee. Evolution doi: 10.1111/evo.12231.
Correlations between fitness and genome-wide heterozygosity … have been reported across a wide range of taxa. The genetic basis of these correlations is controversial: do they arise from genome-wide inbreeding (‘general effects’) or the ‘local effects’ of overdominant loci acting in linkage disequilibrium with neutral loci?
In the news
Apple Academic Publishing, an outfit not (apparently) affiliated with the gadget manufacturer, is selling $100 books consisting entirely of papers previously published under CC-BY licenses, the kind used by most open-access journals. And they’re not asking authors’ permission first. How do you feel about that? Rosie Redfield wants to know.
Remembering the lives of pioneering field biologists Ted Parker and Al Gentry, 20 years after their deaths in a plane crash.
A non-inclusive, non-normative list of upsides to being a woman in science.
