Elmer Lab

Congrats to James Burgon who has been awarded funding from the Systematics Research Fund  (Linnean Society of London and the Systematics Association) for his phylogenomics research on salamanders.

Congratulations to Heather McDevitt who has been awarded a Life Sciences Undergraduate Vacation Scholarship for her project on polymorphisms and genetics.

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. ...

In a recent collaboration with the First Nations Gwich'in Renewable Resources Board, research about local fisheries of the Far North: Hans Recknagel, Amy Amos & Kathryn R Elmer (2014) Morphological and ecological variation among populations and subspecies of Burbot ( Lota lota) from the Mackenzie River Delta, Canada . CFN 128 (4) The Mackenzie River Delta is a suture zone where many postglacial lineages come in contact as the Eurasian lineages reach east and south and North American lineages extended northward. We found considerable variability in ecological and morphological traits of burbot fishes in the region, and suggestion that that the different subspecies of burbot may exploit different niches. This is a new study following on earlier work that identified the first burbot subspecific contact zone and its asymmetric genetic admixture  based on population genetics. Quick dissemination of these findings were important because the Mackenzie River is under developme...

Our interdisciplinary project “Convergence, connectivity, and continuity: Topological perspectives for mining novel biological information from ‘omics data” and super-candidate Mel Chen from Australia have been awarded a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith PhD Scholarship from the University of Glasgow! This research will bridge algebraic topology (L. Watson, Maths) and evolutionary biology (K. Elmer, IBAHCM). We look forward to welcoming Mel to Glasgow in the autumn.