New paper: Lizards break Dollo's Law?

Our paper on the evolution of oviparity and viviparity, as inferred from phylogenomics, is now fully available in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution at  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2018.05.029

Common lizards break Dollo’s law of irreversibility: genome-wide phylogenomics support a single origin of viviparity and re-evolution of oviparity



Well done to Hans, who led this work as part of his PhD 'Trees through time', a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Interdisciplinary grant from the University of Glasgow and into the NERC grant.



This research was earlier covered by New Scientist here when the ms was a preprint.


Popular posts from this blog

 in a collaboration with Amelie Crespel and Shaun Killen, we brought some genomics to an applied evolutionary question - is there evolutionary response to fisheries harvesting? We suspected that forces like size-selective harvest can have impact but what about environmental or demographic context? Open access paper here ! Crespel A, Schneider K, Miller T, Rácz A, Jacobs A, Lindström J, Elmer KR, Killen SS (2021) Genomic basis of fishing-associated selection varies with population density. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 118, e2020833118. Significance: Fisheries-associated selection is recognized as one of the strongest potential human drivers of contemporary evolution in natural populations. The results of this study show that while simulated commercial fishing techniques consistently remove fish with traits associated with growth, metabolism, and social behavior, the specific genes under fishing selection differ depending on the density of the targeted population. This finding suggest
Read more

Welcome to new lab members!

We welcome two new lab members for autumn 2021 - postdoc Morgane Bonade and PhD student Nic Strowbridge.  Morgane is working on the project 'do common lizards break Dollo's Law' by reversing back to oviparity? This is a NERC funded project that tests functionally - using genetic crosses, RNAseq, and phylogeny - some hypotheses put forward in our phylogenomic reconstruction that suggested reversal (open access paper here in MPE ).  Nic is an IAPETUS2 doctoral training programme student working on convergent evolution of colouration and toxicity defence in salamanders, in collaboration with Mike Ritchie at St Andrews.
Read more

New paper: Functional genetic basis of reproductive mode

Image
Our paper on the genetic basis of parity mode is now published. The functional genetic architecture of egg-laying and live-bearing reproduction in common lizards H. Recknagel, M. Carruthers, A. Yurchenko, M. Nokhbatolfoghahai, N.A. Kamenos, M.M. Bain, K.R. Elmer Nature Ecology and Evolution 2021 SharedIt link:  https://rdcu.be/cy5S2 All amniotes reproduce either by egg-laying (oviparity), which is ancestral to vertebrates, or by live-bearing (viviparity), which has evolved many times independently. However, the genetic basis of these parity modes has never been resolved and consequently its convergence across evolutionary scales is currently unknown. Here we leveraged natural hybridisations between oviparous and viviparous common lizards (Zootoca vivipara) to describe the functional genes and genetic architecture of parity mode and its key traits, eggshell and gestation length, and compared our findings across vertebrates. In these lizards, parity trait genes were associated with prog
Read more