Category Archives: howto

Exploring color palettes in R

How often have you had to squint at figures with unpleasant color palettes in a manuscript online or in print, and ultimately given up on distinguishing between fifty (or maybe just around 30) shades of gray? I found the RColorBrewer … Continue reading

Posted in howto, population genetics, R, software, STRUCTURE | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

LaTeX hacks to save your life (and your co-authors')

In light of this recent study by Knauff and Nejasmic (2014) that makes a lot of presumptive leaps on the utility and effectiveness of in scientific writing, my case for the utility of for every equation, reference, table, figure, and … Continue reading

Posted in howto, science publishing | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

SpaceMix, and a brief history of Spatial Genetics

Incorporating spatial data to inform studies of the population demography of a species has a long history of interest. From inferring geographical clines in Principal Components Analyses (Menozzi et al. 1978), using location data as “informative priors” during model-based estimation … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, howto, population genetics, R, software | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

A population genetic R-evolution

Uphill, both ways, in the snow, without shoes … quite apt when thinking of the dark days, in the not too distant past, in which a separate input file was needed for each popgen analysis in order to use a … Continue reading

Posted in howto, methods, population genetics, R, software, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Linking gene expression and phenotype in an emerging model organism

Last week in his post “Transcriptomics in the wild (populations),” TME contributor Noah Snyder-Mackler focused on a recent paper by Alvarez et al. that reviews the last decade of transcriptomic research including the goal of linking gene expression and phenotype. Researchers today routinely collect transcriptomic data for non-model … Continue reading

Posted in genomics, howto, methods, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Migration Circos plots in R

We’ve all seen them – colorful, and I daresay, pretty darn informative. Circos plots are fun visualizations of large data-sets. I’ve seen them used in two contexts in comparative genomics – to represent structural variants in homologous chromosome segments in … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, genomics, howto, R, software | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Geophylogeny plots in R for Dummies

Amid basting my tofurky, here’s a follow-up to my previous post on quick-fix overlays of admixture plots on geographical maps in R. I recently discovered a wonderful R package called “phytools” from Liam Revell, which makes really neat phylogenetic trees (with … Continue reading

Posted in howto, phylogenetics, population genetics, R, software, STRUCTURE | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Admixture maps in R for Dummies

Before we get started, I’d like to point everyone to an excellent tutorial here by Kim Gilbert on making maps in R. I have been grappling with overlaying admixture plots, and migration routes on top of maps recently, and thought I’d put … Continue reading

Posted in howto, population genetics, R, software, STRUCTURE | Tagged , | 14 Comments

2014 NGS Field Guide: Resistance is Futile (mostly, at least for a while)

This year, to introduce the 2014 update to his Next Generation Sequencing Field Guide—perennially our most-accessed community resource—Travis Glenn has a bit more to say than just what goes in the tables. So here it is as a guest post! … Continue reading

Posted in howto, methods, next generation sequencing | 1 Comment

Using GitHub with R and RStudio

A few weeks back, The Molecular Ecologist released an article about GitHub and also created an organization where you can fork or simply download code shared by the Molecular Ecology community. A few of you out there may still be … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, howto, R, software | 29 Comments