Lynda Delph talked about how she found Haldane’s rule in a species of plant that has sex chromosomes. I got a little lost with all of her logic so I should probably read her paper, but I think she was arguing that the dominance theory does not explain male rarity while both dominance theory and the faster male theory serve to explain pollen sterility. I’ll have to look up her paper though to see the actual data again before I make too many claims about what she said.
Yaniv’s talk went well too, he described some ngs data he has on M. nasutus and M. gutattus and some patterns of introgression that he found.
The highlight of my day was a talk by Matt Brandley who was looking at placentation in squamates, specifically skinks. He was trying to figure out how the evolution of viviparity occurs and used a species of skink that shows polymorphism for viviparity to compare uterine gene expression. He found that there was not much different at all between the two reproductive modes but thought that due to pretty stringent penalties against high variance and a large sample size that had high variance in expression levels that he may have missed a bunch of true differences. He said that he had just gotten the data back and hadn’t had time to really play with it much yet. In a previous paper he’s described some differences in uterine gene expression in another skink and compared it to mammals and found that many of the same genes are used to facilitate live birth. For example both systems must repress the mother’s immune system to keep her from rejecting the offspring.
Lila’s talk was fun too, it was good to hear about Margaret’s old project looking at thermal adaptation in mimulus in Yellowstone park.
There were no talks in the afternoon and I headed up the tram with Taichi and Katya to hike down the mountain, ended up meeting Rob up there and eventually Kris. We spotted a marmot and a mountain goat which was pretty fun. Below are photos of the view from the top and a golden manteled ground squirrel who was interested in some peanuts.
My poster session was in the evening and I was pretty worried that no-one would show up after the afternoon’s break, but it was packed. I had about 10 minutes in the beginning free and after that it was one person after another. Turelli came and chated as did Kristi Montooth and Nitin as well as a number of other folks. Had a couple really good chats about imprinting and ligers and how the dominance theory may explain growth disorders involving imprinting. Afterwards Kris and I went and hung out with Doug and Matt and Paulo in the bar at the hotel and ended up heading home early as we were pretty exhausted after 3 hours on the mountain and 2 hours of hard poster-sessioning.
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