Elmer Lab

See the coming conference in Tromso for a few fishy days of discussion and presentation about charr and their amazing diversity. I am very pleased be an invited speaker to talk about charr genomics and to meet up with some great colleagues and researchers in the land of the midnight sun! - Kathryn    http://charr.akvaplan.com/program#monday-15th

Kathryn Elmer and colleagues' work on parallel evolution of cichlid fishes is featured in the new  Naturally Speaking podcast and blog  in the article ' How many ways are there to make a fish?' Check that and the other great entries for the research activities in our lab and in the Institute .

Using molecular markers in ecology and evolution is moving massively parallel. Not only can the new era of genotyping using next-generation sequencing give high resolution through generating thousands of markers but, with sufficient genomic knowledge, can be used to localize polymorphisms across the genome. Restriction site associated DNA sequencing (RADseq) of various different forms (see a very nice recent review of approaches here ) is currently a major method of choice for researchers studying complex genomes and without requiring prior genomic resources. We have recently developed a new genotyping-by-sequencing RAD sequencing approach for the Ion Torrent platform. The method can robustly generate thousands of loci using a modification of the ddRADseq protocol developed by Hopi Hoekstra's lab based on RADseq and applied on Ion Torrent/ Ion Proton/ Ion PGM semi-conductor sequencing. The method is modular, has a low error rate, is economical, and importantly can be very fast. ...