Sunday, April 25, 2010

Nadia Singh is the newest Assistant Professor in the Genetics Department at NC State

image
Nadia Singh, a former PhD student in the lab, has accepted an Assistant Professor position in the Genetics Department at the North Carolina State University. Nadia received her PhD from Stanford in 2006, and went on to a postdoctoral position at Cornell University in the labs of Andy Clark and Chip Aquadro. Nadia will begin her new position at NCSU in the Fall of 2010. NCSU has a wonderfully rich community with a strong emphasis on molecular, quantitative, developmental, computational, and statistical genetics, and Nadia is looking forward to continuing her work on mutation and recombination rate variation in Drosophila in this new and interactive environment. Nadia is the first lab graduate student to start her own lab. We are all extremely proud and wish Nadia the best of luck!

Friday, April 9, 2010

Adaptation to temperate climates in Drosophila

image
The potential of geographic studies of genetic variation for the understanding of adaptation has been recognized for some time. In Drosophila, most of the available studies are based on a priori candidates giving a biased picture of the genes and traits under spatially varying selection. In a paper just published in PLoS Genetics and led by Josefa Gonzalez, we performed a genome-wide scan of adaptations to temperate climates associated with Transposable Element (TE) insertions. We integrated the available information of the identified TEs and their nearby genes to provide plausible hypotheses about the phenotypic consequences of these insertions. Considering the diversity of these TEs and the variety of genes into which they are inserted, it is surprising that their adaptive effects are consistently related to temperate climate-related factors. The TEs identified in this work add substantially to the markers available to monitor the impact of climate change on populations.