About the author Shelby Tisinai is a PhD Candidate in the Busch Lab at Washington State University. She is currently using molecular techniques to explore environmental and genomic drivers of local adaptation in plant populations endemic to steep elevational gradients. “It’s called research because you always have to redo it.” A cynical statement formed from […]
Category: Plants
Conference catch-up: Memories of Mexico – Agavoideae Conference and Genotyping By Sequencing Workshop
About the blog author: Dr Christopher (Chris) Irwin Smith is an evolutionary ecologist, a Professor of Biology at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and current AGA council member. His research focuses on the pollination biology of yuccas and combines traditional field ecology with molecular genetics and genomics. Chris was a 2022 Fulbright Garcia Robles US […]
EECG Embarkation: Uncovering the sources of adaptive genetic variation in wild tomato
**The AGA grants EECG Research Awards each year to graduate and post-doctoral researchers who are at a critical point in their research, where additional funds would allow them to conclude their research project and prepare it for publication. EECG awardees also get the opportunity to hone their science communication and write three posts over their […]
EECG Embarkation: Genetic basis and spatial variability of climate change adaptation in the common morning glory
**The AGA grants EECG Research Awards each year to graduate and post-doctoral researchers who are at a critical point in their research, where additional funds would allow them to conclude their research project and prepare it for publication. EECG awardees also get the opportunity to hone their science communication and write three posts over their […]
Behind the science: Where and how to move forward? A shared plant and human dilemma
**This post is a part of the series on the 2019 AGA Presidential Symposium – Sex and Asex: the genetics of complex life cycles** About the author: Sissi is an evolutionary ecologist interested in how plants reproduce and interact with their biotic environment, in particular with their pollinators. She is a postdoctoral fellow currently working […]
Two Days and a Quarter of a Century – the inspiration for the 2019 AGA President’s Symposium
About the author: Dr. Maria E. Orive received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently Professor and Chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas. While at KU, she spent one year as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Dr. Orive’s research in […]
Reproductive Isolation and the ‘Hockey Assist’ – How a shift to self-compatible mating systems can bring about reproductive isolation
The first steps in the process of speciation are a bit paradoxical when you think about it…how does one freely interbreeding species make the transition to two reproductively isolated, independent species? More specifically, how do intraspecific mating barriers become interspecific? And why even are there intraspecific mating barriers? Well, that last question is easier to […]
Three’s not a crowd! Does genetic variation across a tri-species hybrid zone respond to environmental differences across the landscape?
Hybrid zones elucidate the barriers to interspecific reproduction, the raw material for speciation, and thus are unparalleled resources for evolutionary biologists (Harrison 1993). However, when hybrid zones appear to lack reproductive barriers to gene flow, they pose a different set of questions, for example, what are the historical and contemporary factors which facilitate gene flow […]
Oversalted: How does a tiny floating plant cope with urban runoff?
Humans are globally redistributing salt. Soils (Rengasamy 2006) and freshwater (Dugan et al. 2017) are becoming saltier, while the ocean is experiencing fresh and salty anomolies (European Space Agency 2019). In North America and other temperate zones, salt is commonly used to deice roadways and sidewalks. This makes life much safer for people, but when […]