Posts made in August, 2016

English wall lizards look inbred

Our new paper in Molecular Ecology makes use of 21 introductions of wall lizards into England to show how founder history affects the loss of genetic diversity. We also show that early embryonic mortality is very high in non-native populations compared to native ones.

This looks very much like inbreeding depression, but not all populations or individuals that are inbred do poorly. So there’s different interesting things going on and it could be an interesting system to study in more genomic detail.

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Euro Evo Devo meeting in Uppsala

EvoDevo2016

Nathalie giving her talk

The group was well represented at the 2016 Euro Evo Devo meeting in a beautiful and sunny Uppsala. Nathalie gave a talk on the role of transposable elements in the Anolis lizard radiation, and Antonio presented results from his PhD thesis, which reveal how some turtles evolved the ability to withdraw their heads into the shell. Both talks were great and stimulated a lot of discussion.

Nathalie and Antonio also organised a fantastic symposium on plasticity and evolution, with Arkhat Abzhanov and Armin Moczek among the speakers. Definitely one of the highlights of the meeting! Tobias did not really contribute anything, but he made some new friends and learnt a lot in symposia and at the pub.

Thanks to Graham Budd and his team for great organisation and entertainment!

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