Category Archives: population genetics

What's a Wachapreague?

Heading north to Virginia (and our base of operations at the VIMS Eastern Shore Lab, ESL) was one of the easiest, in terms of travel and packing. Though maybe not the coolest ride around, a minivan doesn’t have 50 lb … Continue reading

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Clinal genomic variation in Drosophila species

Two recent manuscripts describe adaptive evolutions to clinal/latitudinal variations in Drosophila species to supplement a growing wealth of recent studies on geographic variation and adaptive evolution in natural populations of fruitflies (eg. see Kao et al. 2015, Zhao et al. … Continue reading

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2D Posterior Density Plots in R

I have been grappling with visualizing two dimensional histograms of posterior density distributions of parameters, as estimated by one of your favorite programs – IMa2, MIGRATE-n, MSVAR, etc. All these programs print out distributions of estimated parameters, and here’s a … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, howto, population genetics, R, software | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

On getting empirical with the obvious

I’ve been thinking lately about the value in doing “simple” things. As a PhD student, my time is constantly incentivised by productivity (what am I doing right now that is working towards a publication?). But that doesn’t jive well with … Continue reading

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Genomics of domestication in chicken and cattle

Two recent studies attempt to understand the process of adaptive evolution in domestication and artificial selection by characterizing (a) sweeps, and their association with phenotypes in extant hybrid lines (Sheng et al. 2015), and (b) phylogenomic position of an extinct … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, domestication, evolution, genomics, natural history, Paleogenomics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection, speciation, STRUCTURE | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

On false positives in Isolation with Migration analyses

The IM suite of tools (IM, IMa, IMa2, IMa2p, etc.) are used widely by molecular ecologists at large for the analyses and estimation of ancestral demography under an Isolation with Migration (IM) model. However, these tools come with fundamental assumptions … Continue reading

Posted in evolution, genomics, howto, IMa2, methods, Molecular Ecology views, natural history, population genetics, software, theory | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Along the Mackerel Road

We left Hokkaido and flew to Osaka where we collected our next rental car (our first teeny tiny one!) As our flight was delayed due to weather in Hokkaido, we decided to break the journey between Osaka and Obama (it … Continue reading

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Genetic distance predicts the spread of deadly fungal infections in bats

You’ve probably heard about White-Nose Syndrome (WNS), the particularly nasty fungal pathogen that has decimated North American bat populations over the last decade. Not only has WNS been extremely deadly, but the speed at which it’s spread has been alarming. Really alarming: Understanding … Continue reading

Posted in Molecular Ecology, the journal, phylogeography, population genetics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

On background selection in Ficedula flycatchers

Several recent studies (including those I wrote about last week) use genome-wide scans of differentiation to understand evolutionary mechanisms behind high or low divergence. However, there has been contentious support for and against these differentiation islands being due to differential … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, Coevolution, evolution, genomics, natural history, population genetics, selection, speciation, theory | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

An unspoiled frontier

“An unspoiled frontier, an escape from industrialized Japan and a chance to connect with nature …” or so says the Rough Guide to Japan (6th edition, September 2014). We had experienced a bit of the city-scene in Hakodate, but the rest … Continue reading

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