Category Archives: genomics

Move or adapt to changing climate? These chipmunks have had to do both

Climate change threatens to land many, many species in conditions for which they’re not adapted — too warm, too dry, too stormy, too flood-prone — and traditionally the ways that living things might respond to this are framed as a … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, comparative phylogeography, genomics, mammals | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Luck be a Korarchaeota tonight

Some tiny microbes are making a pretty big splash, and not just in the hot springs they call home in Yellowstone National Park. Recently, there was an interesting article published in Nature Microbiology about some amazing archaea, which are generally … Continue reading

Posted in community ecology, ecology, evolution, genomics, metagenomics, microbiology, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Where credit is due

I am trying to keep this short. You might remember my recent blog post on data sharing. I basically wanted to point out that data acquisition can be an art on its own. It can take months of planning, applying … Continue reading

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Towards unrestricted use of public genomic data

Last week, a friend sent me this policy forum article published in Science. Fifty co-authors, mostly tenured and from prestigious universities, some of them among my dearest idols, have written this piece to call for publicly available genome data. What … Continue reading

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Is taxonomy still relevant to innovative science?

Elise Keister wrote this post as a final project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Conservation Genetics course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Elise studies the impact of climate change on corals as a PhD student in Dr. Dustin Kemp’s lab. Elise … Continue reading

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“Through endurance we conquer.”* Are humans really the only ones who can make it across Drake’s Passage?

Sabrina Heiser wrote this post as a project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Conservation Genetics course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Sabrina grew up in Germany, completed a BSc (Hons) in Marine Biology at Plymouth University (UK) and then lived in … Continue reading

Posted in blogging, DNA barcoding, ecology, evolution, genomics, haploid-diploid | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

"It takes all the sequencing you can do, just to keep up with coevolution"

One of the most fundamental observations of evolution is that it never seems to stop. This is particularly true in host-pathogen coevolution, in which each species must adapt in response to the other. This constant evolution is the process biologists … Continue reading

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Symbiotic organs shaped by distinct modes of genome evolution in cephalopods

Last week I was whining about gaps in our understanding of evolutionary processes in the ocean. The universe heard me, and today I am satisfied to write about the published genome of Euprymna scolopes – the Hawaiian bobtail squid and … Continue reading

Posted in Coevolution, evolution, genomics, microbiology, next generation sequencing, Symbiosis | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Earth BioGenome: The launch of biology’s moonshot

The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence all currently described ~1.5 million eukaryotic species on earth (Lewin et al., 2018; Figure 1). The scale and scope are enormous, and it is hard to imagine a more ambitious but exciting goal. … Continue reading

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How island foxes are living on the edge

Back in 2016, Robinson et al. (2016) published a genomic analyses of the Channel Island foxes and they showed that despite extremely low genome-wide diversity, the island foxes do not seem to be suffering from inbreeding depression. Read the post … Continue reading

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