Elmer Lab

Congrats -- Liam was awarded a Student Grant from the British Herpetological Society for his coming Master's research on molecular phylogenetics and phylogeography of salamanders. Well done!

Good news! Glasgow graduate James Burgon has been awarded IBAHCM's only NERC studentship for the Elmer Lab project "How the salamander got his spots". Congrats James!

yikes, for most of last week Hans was fishing for gravid female whitefish in Loch Lomond. Cold hands but fun work! Finally, at least one of us is getting away from the computer this winter ...

Kathryn Elmer is speaking in Edinburgh on Wednesday 23 January -- "Ecological and genomic parallel evolution in crater lake cichlid fishes"

Hans' linkage map (that is, a linkage map of cichlids, not a linkage map of Hans) is out in G3 ! This double-digest restriction site associated DNA sequencing (ddRADSeq) will prove a *very* important methodology for our population genomics. Good-bye microsatellites, hello SNPs!

We have received a great little "Catalyst" award to do some sequencing with Glasgow Polyomics . The project is a pilot to examine phenotypic plasticity and gene expression in lab-reared freshwater fishes. update 05-03-2013: Here's a photo of Oli and his fabulous tank layout for the charr and whitefish. Now the fry must grow and we must wait ...

Check out my talk today at 1 pm-- right here in Graham Kerr lecture theatre for the IBAHCM seminar series "Parallel evolution of crater lake cichlid fish"

catching up with some old news ... Kathryn was awarded a 4-year Marie Curie Career Integration Gran t! This is for studying adaptive divergence in charr and whitefish, two freshwater fishes that are famous for ecological divergence in sympatry and in parallel .

some of our recent work from Axel's group in Konstanz has been covered by National Geographic . This was on the parallel evolution of thick vs thin lips of Midas cichlids in crater lakes and great lakes in Nicaragua and is mostly based on the findings from two recent papers: Elmer KR, Lehtonen TK, Kautt A, Harrod C, Meyer A (2010) Rapid sympatric ecological differentiation of crater lake cichlid fishes in historic times . BMC Biology , 8 , 60. Manousaki T, Hull P, Kusche H, Machado-Schiaffino G, Franchini P, Harrod C, Elmer KR, Meyer A (2013). P arsing parallel evolution: ecological divergence and differential gene expression in thick-lipped Midas cichlid fishes of Nicaragua . Molecular Ecology , 22 , 650-669.