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Hello all!
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<div class="">Next Friday, <b class="">February 17th</b>, Professor Emily Jane McTavish is hosting Dr. Suzanne McGaugh from the University of Minnesota for the QSB seminar at
<b class="">12pm in COB2, room 170</b>. </div>
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<div class="">Dr. McGaugh generally studies population genomics, conservation genetics, and molecular evolution in vertebrates and she’ll be talking about her awesome work in cavefish (abstract below). </div>
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<div class="">The grad student lunch (brunch?) will be in <b class="">COB2, room 290 at 10:30am</b>. Those who took Dave's Systems Bio class last semester should definitely join the lunch, given our discussions on cavefish adaptation.</div>
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<div class="">Thanks!</div>
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Noelle Anderson<br class="">
Graduate Student <br class="">
Quantitative and Systems Biology</div>
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University of California, Merced</div>
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<div class=""><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/mcgaughlab/home" class="">https://sites.google.com/site/mcgaughlab/home</a></div>
<div class=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Title: Blind fish provide big insights</span></div>
<div class=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Cavefish exhibit distinct behavioral (e.g. reduced sleep, reduced aggression), metabolic (e.g. increased fat stores), and phenotypic (e.g. reduced eyes, reduced pigment) traits despite
gene flow with surface fish. Mexican tetras have also evolved cave-associated phenotypes multiple times</span><sup class=""> </sup><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">and consist of two major lineages (“new” and “old”) that like diverged
1-4 mya. The genetic underpinnings of many cave-associated traits are different among cave populations even within the new and old lineages,</span><sup class=""> </sup><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">and we are examining divergent
outlier loci between cave and surface fish within caves among these lineages to infer commonalities about the evolutionary process across multiple origins of the cave phenotype. To address these goals, we generated whole genome resequencing data from three
cave populations and two surface populations, including surface and cavefish populations from both the new and old lineages. We also sequenced a closely related congener </span><i class="">A. aeneus </i><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">to
serve as outgroups for polarizing changes in the </span><i class="">A. mexicanus</i><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""> cavefish. In total, we have 45 resequenced genomes (7.3x-19x per individual aligned to the reference genome),
and have thoroughly explored the relationships between populations, revealing extensive gene flow between new and old cavefish lineages, while the surface fish lineages remain distinct. This gene flow shapes how we interpret adaptation to the cave environment,
and the interpretation of outlier loci, and will provide fruitful avenues for future research into gene-flow mediated adaptation.</span></div>
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