About the Blog Author: Dr. Bridgett vonHoldt is an Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. She founded the North American Canine Ancestry Project and is co-founder of the Gulf Coast Canine Project. She is a leader in canine genomics and ancestry genetics, with impacts for endangered species. As […]
Category: Mammals
Symposium Snippets: A call to action, how is this realized?
About the Blog Author: Jacob Green (he/him) is a PhD student in the Puritz Lab of Marine Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Rhode Island. His undergrad degree in Molecular Biology is from California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) where he was Sally Casanova and UROC Scholar in the Logan Lab and applied transcriptomics […]
Behind the Science: Capitalizing on NGS to Investigate Adaptations to Global Change in Pikas
About the Author: Katherine Solari is a Postdoctoral researcher and the Associate Director of Genomics for the Program for Conservation Genomics at Stanford University. Her PhD research with Elizabeth Hadly focused on investigating the mechanisms underlying hypoxia tolerance in pikas (genus Ochotona). Her current work with the Program for Conservation Genomics focuses on developing genomic-based tools […]
No Hair Dye? No Problem: How CRISPER/Cas 9 alters fur color
About the author: Dominique Weddle wrote this post as a part Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Evolutionary Biology course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is an undergraduate student enrolled in the Accelerated Bachelor’s/Master’s Program pursuing a degree in Biology. She is currently in the Harris Lab examining the effects of the RT175 drug on hair greying […]
What does the history of human hybridization share with some of our closest relatives?
About the author: Marcella is an NSF postdoctoral fellow currently working in David Toews’ lab on the genetics of speciation and hybridization. Her current projects involve evolutionary genomics of adaptation, species divergence, and gut microbiome structure in wood warblers. Marcella received her PhD and MS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. […]
Bridging the conservation genetics gap to save Britain’s last wild-living felid
About the author: Dr Helen Taylor is a conservation geneticist who studied for her PhD in New Zealand, working on inbreeding in little spotted kiwi. She went on to undertake postdoctoral research on inbreeding and male fertility in passerines and, at that point, became interested in the integration of genetics into conservation management. After eight years […]
Chronic wasting disease and its threat for endangered deer species
About the author: Nisha Dwivedi a conservation biology masters student at Lund University. As part of her thesis project she is currently exploring genetic variation at the immune gene level in different rodent species. When thinking of pathogens, we usually imagine bacteria, viruses, or even parasites. Indeed, despite their important differences, most […]
A devilishly good example of bridging the conservation genetics gap
About the author: Dr Helen Taylor is a conservation geneticist who studied for her PhD in New Zealand, working on inbreeding in little spotted kiwi. She went on to undertake postdoctoral research on inbreeding and male fertility in passerines and, at that point, became interested in the integration of genetics into conservation management. After eight […]
Nature versus nurture: estimating heritability of deer antlers and body size
Aaron Shafer is an Assistant Professor at Trent University, Canada. Their research uses genomic and bioinformatics tools to characterize adaptive and demographic processes in natural populations. Research organisms in the lab currently include shrews, deer, caribou and mountain goats. Lead-author Aidan Jamieson was an honours biology student who is now doing a MSc at York […]
A horse of a different color patterning mutation
Connecting genotypes to the complex phenotypes they produce is a fundamental goal of genetics. Variation in coat color pigmentation, partly due to the relative ease at which different patterns can be identified, is one of the best-characterized traits at the genetic level, with examples from sheep (Zhang et al., 2017), cattle (Li et al., 2016), […]