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Category Archives: adaptation
Experimental harvesting reduces gene expression variation
Human activities represent unique selective pressures for natural populations. This is especially true for fish species where we routinely harvest individuals from the wild, i.e., through fishing. It has been recognized for some time that overfishing can result in population … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, conservation, evolution, genomics, transcriptomics
Tagged conservation, transcriptomics
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The largest mammalian genome is not polyploid
Some 40 million years ago in South America, following the arrival of the common ancestor of caviomorph rodents from the Old World, big changes were afoot. Specifically, the caviomorph colonists were beginning to give rise to an extant evolutionary progeny … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, genomics, RNAseq, transcriptomics
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This new review explains why soft sweeps are the bane — and the baseline — of ecological genetics
If you’ve done ecological genetics research in the last decade, you’ve almost certainly cited a series of papers by Pleuni Pennings and Joachim Hermisson, which broke down the problem of soft selective sweeps. Pennings and Hermisson have revisited soft sweeps … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics
Tagged haplotype diversity, natural selection, soft sweeps
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When less might be more: The evolution of reduced genomes
The advent of affordable genome sequencing has provided us with a wealth of data. Researchers have sequenced everything from Escherichia coli (4.6 Mbp genome size), to sea urchins (810 Mbp), chimpanzees (3.3 Gbp), and humans (3.2 Gbp). Then there are the … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Coevolution, evolution, genomics, microbiology, population genetics, selection
Tagged ecology, Evolution, genome streamlining, population genetics
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Shared patterns of genomic diversity across populations of distantly related taxa
Genomic diversity is shaped by the complex interplay between the effects of genetic drift and natural selection among populations. Several of these effects, especially those of linked selection at neutral sites, adaptive introgression, and barriers to migration (often called “genomic … Continue reading
Mapping genomes and navigating behavior for wildlife conservation
Virginia Aida wrote this post as a final project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Science Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is currently evaluating a potential pharmacotherapy in traumatic brain injury and anticipates graduating with her MS in summer 2017. Although she … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, association genetics, bioinformatics, blogging, conservation, domestication, evolution, natural history
Tagged behavior, conservation, QTLs, Reintroduction, scicomm, transcriptome, zoos
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Deep in the meadow, under the … seagrass, a bed of temporally stable diversity?
Genetically diverse populations are often more stable and productive. For habitat-forming organisms, such as seagrasses, this results in increased habitat complexity and more abundant associated communities (e.g., Hughes and Stachowicz 2004, Reusch et al. 2005). Spatial patterns of genetic diversity … Continue reading