Yasir Ahmed, a graduate student of the University of Rochester and member of the Orr Lab, is presenting the last EEB seminar for the semester entitled, “Genetics and Evolution of Interspecific Assortative Fertilization in Drosophila,” on Friday, December 7. Yasir received his B.S. and M.S. in Biology from the University of Iowa studying the evolution of reproductive incompatibilities in the virilis group of Drosophila in Bryant McAllister’s lab.
Cara Brand, a graduate student of the University of Rochester and member of the Presgraves Lab, is presenting a talk titled, “An investigation of recent adaptive introgression in Drosophila simulans and D. sechellia,” on Friday, November 30. Cara received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Maryland, College Park. She then spent a year as research technician in Jerry Wilkinson’s lab, working on hybrid male sterility and meiotic drive in stalk-eyed flies. She is now studying the population genetics of interspecific introgression between Drosophila simulans clade species, and the evolution and genetics segregation distortion.
Next week, we will continue our discussion in genetics of speciation using genomic methods. The three papers we are going to discuss are listed as follows:
Turner, T.L., Hahn, M.W. & Nuzhdin, S.V. 2005. Genomic Islands of Speciation in Anopheles gambiae. PLoS Biol 3, e285. [doi link]
Payseur, B. 2010. The state of the field: Using differential introgression in hybrid zones to identify genomic regions involved in speciation. Molecular Ecology Resources. [doi link]
Geraldes, A., P. Basset, K. L. Smith, and M. W. Nachman. 2011. Higher differentiation among subspecies of the house mouse (Mus musculus) in genomic regions with low recombination. Molecular Ecology 20:4722–4736. [doi link]
LeAnne Lovato, a graduate student of the University of Rochester and member of the Garrigan Lab, is presenting a talk titled, “The Evolution of Genes and Genomes in Caenorhabditis,” on Friday, November 16.
Next week, we will continue with the genetics of speciation, focusing on the role of chromosome rearrangements. The three papers we are going to discuss are listed below:
Dr. Roman Yukilevich, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Union College is presenting a talk titled, “The Evolution of Sexual Isolation in Drosophila: Why sympatry breeds contempt and who is to blame?” on Friday, November 9. This is what Dr. Yukilevich says about his research interests: “I am an evolutionary biologist interested in studying how reproductive isolation (speciation) evolves in nature. To achieve this goal I study natural populations of Drosophila that have recently undergone divergence and model the process of speciation on a computer to make further predictions about how species diverge in nature.”
This week we will revisit Allen’s 1995 paper and discuss hybrid incompatibilities. We will also discuss Allen’s 1997 review about Haldane’s Rule.
-Orr, H.A. 1997. Haldane’s Rule. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 28:195-218
Dr. Robert Raguso, Professor in the Department of Neurobiology & Behavior at Cornell University, is presenting a talk titled, “Do odors have dialects? Geographic variation in chemical signals,” on Friday, November 2.
We will now shift the focus of Journal Club to the genetic mechanisms of speciation. We will read Coyne & Orr 1989 about the patterns of speciation in Drosophila and Allen’s 1995 paper about the evolution of hybrid incompatibilities.
-Coyne, J.A and H.A. Orr. 1989. Patterns of speciation in Drosophila. Evolution 43:2
Dr. Richard Meisel is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University, and is presenting a talk titled, “Faster-X Evolution of Gene Expression in Drosophila” on Friday, October 26. For more on his research, here is an excerpt from his website:
