Behavioral Ecology Blog

HELP!
Does anybody have a reference to a paper where sequence data was used to estimate theta (rather than microsatellites) for the purpose of controlling for effective population when looking at selection in different populations and species.
It seems that when looking at selection in multiple species, msats may not offer the best way to subtract out [...]

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OK, so jury duty unfortunately means that I have not been keeping up on current literature.. So, this paper: Wasp Gene Expression Supports an Evolutionary Link Between Maternal Behavior and Eusociality from the 27-Sept issue of Science was missed completely…
Before I get into the paper, I want to rant for a minute about “Next generation” [...]

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I’m liveblogging a paper that should have been read a long time ago…. An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective on human-microbe mutualisms and disease from the October 18 issue of Nature. 1st, the abstract:
The microbial communities of humans are characteristic and complex mixtures of microorganisms that have co-evolved with their human hosts. The species that make [...]

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Department of Integrative Biology
Faculty Position in Experimental Population Genetics
Position ID #1213
The Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is seeking a scientist for a tenure-track position (Assistant Professor) in experimental population genetics.We seek a colleague to join a department with a strong multidisciplinary emphasis and to help [...]

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I just finished reading this paper from a recent issue of Science.. The Title: Disentangling Genetic Variation for Resistance and Tolerance to Infectious Diseases in Animals, which can be found (by subscribers) here. It’s a very nice paper, and brings up an interesting issue, one that I have not previously considered. Here it is… [...]

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Reed has an interesting repost (Chimps are Laughing at You) over on his blog - partly in response to a blog over at PZ’s place that is generating alot of furor..

Basically he has a graph from a 1999 PNAS paper that looks at African hominoid genetic diversity: He presents this graph:
and says:
What [...]

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Following up on my post from a few days ago about the unexpected results looking at MHC polymorphism and mating system- It seems to me that I should make explicit the alternative hypotheses…
So basically there are 4, not-strictly-mutually-exclusive ones that I will test.

MHC polymorphism is related to sexual behavior, i.e. mating system. Basically saying that [...]

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So I was working on some sequences the other night using ClustalW, the online resource for editing and aligning sequences, when Patrick, my 10 year old come up and asked me what I was doing. He noticed all the interesting colors (as bases are colored in this program), and picked up on some of [...]

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The goal is this step is to ligate double stranded linkers to each end of the DNA fragments you created with restriction enzymes. The linkers provide PCR primer binding sites for subsequent steps.. It is a pretty cool idea!
1st step is to make the double stranded linkers.. This is easy. Simple mix equimolar [...]

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So Jeff Wall came to Berkeley today, and spoke to The Department of Integrative Biology on his recent work..
As many of you may be aware, Jeff is a Professor over at the Institute For Human Genetics at UCSF. His recent publication on PLoS Genetics, “Inconsistencies in Neanderthal genomic DNA Sequences“, has received a lot [...]

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