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Monthly Archives: February 2016
Help us build an independent future for The Molecular Ecologist
Back at the beginning of the year, I laid out a plan for community support of The Molecular Ecologist — today, after two busy months, I’m excited to announce that we’re finally launching the first stage of that plan, a crowdfunding … Continue reading
Quick and dirty tree building in R
One of the major obstacles to turning your sequence data into phylogenetic trees is choosing (and learning) a tree-building program. Confounding this problem is the fact that most researchers will want to perform numerous, complementary analyses, each of which may … Continue reading
Posted in howto, methods, phylogenetics, R, software
Tagged ape, distance matrices, maximum likelihood, nucleotide evolution, parsimony, phangorn, phylogenetics, R
3 Comments
How urbanization might affect the five-second rule
At this point, we know that microbes are everywhere and make up complex communities found all over the place ranging from oceanic hydrothermal vents to lakes, soils, and, yes of course, all over you. It has also become apparent that … Continue reading
Posted in community ecology, microbiology
Tagged biogeography, built environment, human health, microbial communities, microbiome, urbanization
2 Comments
Finding hidden structure in uneven data
If you are a population geneticist, your work might include sampling a bunch of individuals and figuring out who is related to who. Seems simple right? Before you can ask questions about differences or similarities between groups, you have to understand what … Continue reading
Petrous bone is the new black
I was just reading an article about skeletal reconstruction of another fascinating extinct species when my supervisor came to my office. I asked: “How about we sequence this creature’s genome?” He replied by asking where the animal had lived. As … Continue reading
Posted in genomics, methods, Paleogenomics
Tagged ancient DNA, endogenous DNA, paleogenomics, petrous bone
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There and back again: an angiosperm's tale
Eelgrass (Zostera marina) is the dominant seagrass in the northern hemisphere and provides the foundation of highly productive ecosystems that rival tropical rain forests and coral reefs in ecosystem services. Zostera isn’t really a grass, but a monocot, like a … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, community ecology, evolution, genomics, plants
Tagged Evolution, genome, plants, salinity, seagrass
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Haute cuisine: what mystery meat did the Explorers Club dine on in 1951?
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve eaten? Grubs? Alligator? Kudu? I bet nothing you’ve ever eaten comes close to what was purportedly on the menu at at the 47th Explorers Club Annual Dinner in 1951 — Wooly Mammoth.
Posted in Uncategorized
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