Journal clubs - Page 5

The earliest documented plague pandemic in Europe, the Plague of Justinian, occurred in the 6th century. However, a recent study by Rasmussen et al. (2015) found plague in Eurasian individuals from the Bronze Age, suggesting that plague was in Europe before the first recorded pandemics. In this journal club, we will discuss a paper by Valtuena, et al. (2016) that presents additional prehistoric Y. pestis genomes.

Friday, January 12th, we will discuss a recent paper by Pires et al .(2017): Interactions within and between clades shaped the diversification of terrestrial carnivores

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This Friday the 13th of May we will discuss a recent paper by Ingram et al. (2016): "Comparative tests of the role of dewlap size in Anolis lizard speciation".

Hope to see you there!

This Friday the journal club will discuss a paper by Harrington and Reeder (2016): "Rate heterogeneity across Squamata, misleading ancestral state reconstruction and the importance of proper null model specification".

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Friday the 9th of December we will discuss a recent paper by Halley (2016): Prenatal Brain-Body Allometry in Mammals

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This thursday, at the Speciation Journal Club, we will discuss a paper entitled "Divergence and Functional Degradation of a Sex Chromosome-like Supergene" by Tutte et al. in Current Biology (2016)

This Friday the journal club will discuss a paper by Simon et al. (2016): "High evolutionary constraints limited adaptive responses to past climate changes in toad skulls".

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Effective population size is an important concept in evolutionary biology, providing information about genetic variability, inbreeding and the efficiency of directional selection. Despite its obvious relevance, it has rarely been discussed in the context of fishery-induced selection.  

This thursday, at the Speciation Journal Club, we will discuss a paper entitled "Neighboring genes for DNA-binding proteins rescue male sterility in Drosophila hybrids" by Lienard et al. in PNAS (2016)

This Friday the journal club will discuss a paper by Sánchez et al (2004): Branching and Self-Organization in Marine Modular Colonial Organisms: A Model.

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This Friday the journal club will discuss a paper by Bush, Hunt and Bambach (2016) in PNAS: Sex and the shifting biodiversity dynamics of marine animals in deep time.

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Integral projection models (IPMs) have become a popular tool to assess questions relating to eco-evolutionary dynamics. Within IPMs, change in a continuous trait of interest (body length, leaf area, horn size etc.) are modelled both within generations (growth) and across generations (inheritance). However, current methods of estimating growth and inheritance inherently fail to properly estimate phenotypic evolution.

This thursday, at the Speciation Journal Club, we will discuss a paper entitled "

Making sense of genomic islands of differentiation in light of speciation" by Wolf and Ellegren,  published in 2016 in Nature Reviews Genetics

This thursday, at the Speciation Journal Club, we will discuss a paper entitled " Feralisation targets different genomic loci to domestication in the chicken" by Johnsson et al. 2016 in Nature Communications

This Friday the journal club will discuss a paper by Sakamoto et al. (2016): ‘Residual diversity estimates’ do not correct for sampling bias in palaeodiversity data.

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This thursday, at the Speciation Journal Club, we will discuss a paper entitled "Genomic variation at the tips of the adaptive radiation of Darwin's finches" by Chaves et al. 2016 in Molecular Ecology.

Diseases can induce detectible genetic changes in host populations by exerting infectious pressure. It has been hypothesized that past plague pandemics have shaped susceptibility to infections in modern European populations. In this journal club, we will discuss immune pathways that have been shaped by convergent evolution in European and Rroma populations in response to plague and other infections.

Estimates of fishing mortality commonly used in stock assessment models are often conditional on restrictive assumptions about natural mortality. However, integrating data from various sources in bayesian state-space models can allow to independently estimate mortalities of different sources.

This thursday, at the Speciation Journal Club, we will discuss a paper entitled "detection of human adaptation during the past 2000 years" by Field et al. 2016 in Science.

This Friday we'll discuss a paper from the future American Naturalist presenting a new tool; "Phylogenetic ANCOVA: Estimating Changes in Evolutionary Rates as Well as Relationships between Traits" by Fuentes-G., Housworth, Weber and Martins.

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In many harvested ecosystems, laws and regulations protect animals below a certain size from being killed. However, in species such as fish, it is often the large, old animals that represent the reproductive capital of a population, and that might need protection even more.

This Friday the journal club will discuss a paper by Gene Hunt and Graham Slater (2016): "Integrating Paleontological and Phylogenetic Approaches to Macroevolution" .

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The study of ancient DNA sequences from Yersinia pestis has yielded important insights into the ecology and evolution of this important human pathogen. However, the analysis and interpretation of ancient DNA data remains challenging compared with modern data. Here, we will discuss two recent papers with new or improved genomes from First and Second Pandemic victims.

This Friday the journal club will discuss a paper by Pennell et al. (2015): "Model Adequacy and the Macroevolution of Angiosperm Functional Traits" .

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