New project: Evolution of reproductive mode

We are back in the field and setting up a new experiment on reproductive mode evolution! Delays due to covid are behind us and I'm thrilled to be at CNRS Station for Theoretical and Experimental Ecology and starting our collaboration with ecology legend Jean Clobert. 

First lizard pots are ready and lizards are arriving this week!



This is a NERC funded project with Maureen Bain and Jean Clobert, and the collaboration of Hans Recknagel and new postdoc Morgane Bonade, to dig deeper into the functional development of oviparity in ancestral and derived lineages. Through this experiment we will directly tackle the thorny issue of putative reversal to oviparity ... do lizards break Dollo's Law?

Also perfect timing for some momentum, as our major paper on functional genomics of oviparity vs viviparity is in press. Free online at https://rdcu.be/cy5S2

more new soon!





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NEW PAPER: Genomics of head and body shape parallelism in Arctic charr

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Published today as free open access in Molecular Ecology :  Genomic underpinnings of head and body shape in Arctic charr ecomorph pairs Sam Fenton, Arne Jacobs, Colin Bean, Colin Adams & Kathryn Elmer The appearance of repeated phenotypes across replicates in similar environments have been described as examples of parallel evolution. However, the genomic bases of these similar phenotypes is rarely elucidated and so whether the same genomic pathways are used to achieve these similar phenotypes across replicates is rarely known. Here we used the repeated divergence of benthivorous-planktivorous ecomorph pairs of Arctic charr to investigate the genomic underpinnings of head and body shape morphology across replicates. We found that only a small number of associated SNPs for each phenotype were shared across all four ecomorph pairs we investigated with selection on associated SNPs varying considerably across replicates. Overall, these results suggest that the genomic underpinnings ...
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