[QSB-grads] Lunch with QSB speaker Suzanne McGaugh 2/17

[Noelle Anderson]

Hello all!

Next Friday, February 17th, Professor Emily Jane McTavish is hosting Dr. Suzanne McGaugh from the University of Minnesota for the QSB seminar at 12pm in COB2, room 170.

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).

The grad student lunch (brunch?) will be in COB2, room 290 at 10:30am. Those who took Dave's Systems Bio class last semester should definitely join the lunch, given our discussions on cavefish adaptation.

Thanks!

Noelle Anderson
Graduate Student
Quantitative and Systems Biology
University of California, Merced


https://sites.google.com/site/mcgaughlab/home
Title: Blind fish provide big insights
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 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, 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 A. aeneus to serve as outgroups for polarizing changes in the A. mexicanus 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.


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