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Author Archives: Melissa DeBiasse
Adaptive divergence in the monkey flower
Theory suggests adaptive divergence can proceed in the face of gene flow when adaptive alleles occur in areas of the genome, such as chromosomal inversions, that are protected from recombination, which can break up beneficial allele pairings. In their recent Evolution paper, … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, plants
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Plastic and evolved responses to host fruit in apple maggot flies
The apple maggot fly, Rhagoletis pomonella, is a prominent system for the study of sympatric speciation. Sister taxa in the R. pomonella species complex, the apple-infesting race of R. pomonella and the snowberry-infesting R. zephyria, have sympatric distributions and the fruiting time of their preferred hosts widely overlaps. … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, speciation, transcriptomics
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A love letter to sponges
Like many kids interested in marine biology, growing up I wanted to work on sharks. After college I interned for a year at the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Lab under the guidance of two great mentors, Jim Gelsleichter and … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Just in time for spring break- the phylogenetic and medicinal history of Aloe vera
It’s spring break season across the United States, which means many undergraduates are shedding their winter layers and flocking to warm, tropical destinations. After a week of fun in the sun, I’m sure many of them will rely on Aloe vera to soothe their sunburns. … Continue reading
Posted in medicine, phylogenetics, plants, Uncategorized
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Sometimes selection gives you more bang for your buck
Most species experience many environmental stressors simultaneously which means the direction and magnitude of evolutionary responses will depend on trade-offs between traits whose relationship may prevent them from being simultaneously optimized. Multiple sources of stress may act in opposing ways, for … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, proteomics
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Coral conservation through assisted evolution
Coral reefs occupy a tiny portion of the world’s oceans (see map below) but their biodiversity is hugely disproportionate to their size. More than 450 million people from 109 countries live in close proximity to coral reefs and depend upon the … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, conservation, evolution, methods
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The results are in for the journal selection survey
Two weeks ago I wrote a post about a recent paper by Salinas and Munch that presented a model-based method for determining to which journal an author should submit a manuscript for publication. I was curious to know how the readers … Continue reading
Posted in career, Impact Factors, methods, peer review, science publishing
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Breaking free of the guide tree: two new species delimitation methods
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a new method to incorporate morphology and DNA sequences into species delimitation. Including both data types improved the results but a couple of tricky spots remained: 1) correctly assigning individuals to putative species and 2) estimating … Continue reading
Posted in methods, species delimitation
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