Papers from the lab are getting noticed

First, Nature Review Genetics highlighted Ruth Hershberg's PLoS Genetics paper. And then Genetics published a paper by Philipp Messer and highlighted it on the cover and in the highlights. Yay for us! More details about Philipp's paper to follow.

Estimating mutational rates and patterns from new genomic data

Mutations are the foundation of genetic diversity, yet we remain uncertain about their rates and patterns. This is because new mutations are difficult to assess experimentally as they occur at extremely low rates in individuals. Indirect estimates of mutation rates from levels of divergence or heterozygosity suffer from unknown selective and demographic biases and disregard deleterious mutations. In a paper just published by Genetics Philipp Messer demonstrates how unbiased mutation rate estimates can be obtained from polymorphism data gathered from deep sequencing projects. This promises to facilitate the assessment of several long-standing problems of evolutionary biology. The paper is also featured in the issue highlights and on the cover of Genetics' August issue.

Yuan Zhu joins the lab

Yuan Zhu, a second year graduate student from Genetics, is done with her rotations and has decided to join our lab. In her rotation project she studied evoltuion of prokaryotic genome size. It is not yet clear what she will focus on in her dissertation - she is broadly interested in the theoretical and experimental aspects of genome evolution, evolution of complex traits, and population genetics. She is hoping to combine experimental and theoretical/computation work in her thesis. We are all delighted with her choice!