A big congratulations to Madeleine for a successful PhD viva on her project on ecological transcriptomics and adaptive divergences in salmonid fishes! And here she is celebrating with a delicious charr cake. (tasted better than that sounds)
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 ...
Warm welcome to our new and excellent postdoc Hongxin Xie! He's bringing lots of evolutionary and squamate expertise to contribute to our NERC project testing oviparity reversal