Research events - Page 24

This week we'll be discussing a box fresh paper by Tanja Stadler and co-workers in American Naturalist: On Age and Species Richness of Higher Taxa

Friday seminar by Thomas Marcussen

In a sort of a special edition of the TGAC journal club, we hope to finally find out whether Thor Heyerdahl was right after all with his claims regarding early contact between the cultures of South America and Easter Island, whether his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947 was just a fun cruise across the Pacific without any scientific substantiation, or whether genomic data actually supports his ideas. We will find the answers in the very recent paper by Moreno-Mayar et al. (2014), which just came out in Current Biology and comes with a commentary in Science. Four of the authors are working at the University Hospital here in Oslo, and at least two of them will join our discussion!

As there will be a CELS meeting this Tuesday at 1 pm, the TGAC discussion will be earlier than usual, at 11 am.

Late lunch talk by Robin Cristofari

This week, we read a paper from Ecology Letters by Barnagaud et al. 2014.

PROGRAM (pdf: This is an excerpt from the booklet that will be handed out at the conference)

Friday seminar by Charles Krebs

This week we will read a paper on competition in bryozoans by Svensson and Marshall 2014: "Limiting resources in sessile systems: food enhances diversity and growth of suspension feeders despite available space".

We feel that it's time to find out about the Pairwise Sequential Markovian Coalescent and it derivations. How does it magically infer demography from single genomes? Why does the original author recommend other tools? Why do all these demography plots look the same? And can I use it for my data? Once more, we'll need more than one paper to find out. We'll focus on the first publication to present the PSMC, Li & Durbin (2011) in Nature, but we invite participants with a bit of extra time to check out and report on updates on the method, which were published by Schiffels & Durbin (2014) in Nature Genetics, and by Harris et al. (2014) on arXiv.

A collection of recent CEES publications

This tuesday, we'll discuss genome resequencing and hybrid origin of pig populations, as recently reported by Bosse et al. (2014) in Molecular Ecology, Bosse et al. (2014) in Nature Communications, and Ramírez et al. (2014) in Heredity. We'll focus on the Molecular Ecology paper, but try to provide a brief summary of the other two studies as well.

Friday seminar by Horacio Schneider

This week we read Wagner and Marcot's "Modelling distributions of fossil sampling rates over time, space and taxa: assessment and implications for macroevolutionary studies" in MEE.

As we are starting to worry about bias in branch lengths when phylogenetic approaches are used with genomic data, we'll have a look at McGill et al. (2013), which discusses the influence of minor allele frequency thresholds on estimates of demography.

Friday seminar by Lars Werdelin

Come join a discussion on "A novel Bayesian method for inferring and interpreting the dynamics of adaptive landscapes from phylogenetic comparative data" by Uyeda and Harmon fresh from Sys Bio.

As a follow-up to our discussion on genomic islands of speciation two weeks ago, we'll continue along the same lines with a recent paper by Ruegg et al. (2014) that came out recently in Molecular Evolution.

Late lunch talk by Walter Salzburger.

Friday seminar by Andrea Waeschenbach from Natural History Museum, London, UK

In this weeks edition of the TGAC journal club, we'll focus on African cichlid fishes, and the "genomic substrate" of their adaptive radiation: The paper by Brawand et al. (2014), was published last week in Nature.

This week in the macroevolution journal club we will read a paper: "Calibrating the Tree of Life: fossils, molecules and evolutionary timescales", Forest, 2009.

We restart the TGAC+CELS journal club series with a discussion of a recent review (Cruickshank & Hahn 2014) on genome divergence between closely related species. A substantial paper, but a highly relevant one, also for our friends from the speciation journal club!

This week we discuss a new book chapter by Nunn and Zhu on using "Phylogenetic Prediction to Identify 'Evolutionary Singularities'"  with our visitor Matt Pennell.

Late lunch talk by Matt Pennell.