Live from #Evol2016 – Saturday June 18th

The Molecular Ecologist team is all over this year’s Evolution meeting in Austin, Texas.
You can find all of the TME contributors on Twitter using the sidebar on the right or compiled in a handy Twitter list here. Follow along with all meeting news using the hashtag #Evol2016.
As part of our coverage of the meeting, we will be previewing presentations we’re excited about and recapping the highlights of each day here on the blog. To kick things off, here are some of the talks we’ve bookmarked for day 1 of the conference:
Jeremy 
Mark Margres: Quantity, not quality: rapid adaptation to local prey proceeds through venom- gene expression changes in rattlesnakes (11:15, Adaptation/genomics 2, MR9AB) — Fun natural history, rapid adaptation, genomics, species interactions. Heck, yes.

Naomi Pierce: Ant symbioses: from parasitism to mutualism (1:00, ASN Spotlight: Evolution of species interactions 1, Ballroom A) — of course I want to hear Naomi Pierce talk about ant symbioses. Unfortunately it’s during the session in which I’m presenting.

Moises Exposito-Alonso: The 1001 genomes of Arabidopsis thaliana reveal a deep climatic adaptation history driven by summer drought (1:00, Adaptation/genomics 3, MR9AB) — This is leading off my session, and it’s one I’d hate to have missed anyway. Looks like a lot of data, and I want to see how they use it.
Melissa
Sarah Barfield & Mikhail Matz: Genomics of local adaptation in corals (Acropora millepora) from the Great Barrier Reef (9:00am MR9AB) — The Matz Lab is based here in UT Austin and I’m looking forward to seeing some local science on marine inverts.

Laura Lagomarsino, Fabien Condamine, Andreas Mulch, Alexandre Antonelli, Charles Davis: The abiotic and biotic drivers of rapid diversification in Andean bellflowers (Campanulaceae) (9:15am Ballroom A) — Laura recently accepted a TT job at LSU and she rocked her job talk so I’m sure her presentation here will impress.

David Plachetzki: Phylogenomics reveals an ancient metazoan sensory toolkit and a more recent chemosensitivity paradigm shift in the ancestor of protostomes (3:30pm MR10A) — As someone who works on sponges, I can’t resist a talk on metazoan evolution