Kris and I arrived late Friday night. It’s good that we had Siri to navigate for us as we would have been completely lost otherwise. Turns out that Brice got one hell of an awesome mansion for us to live in for the next couple days.
Driving in in the morning, we saw a coyote - great way to start a biology conference.
We got a bit lost on the way in - it was not immediately obvious where the conference actually was, but we finally found it and got registered.
Here’s some talks that I went to that really stood out:
Daniel Matute - great, talked fast and I am not 100% familiar with all the molecular techniques that you can use in drosophila, so I got a little lost in the end. He is using deficiency mapping technique to find the genes that isolate melanogaster/yakuba (I think it was yakuba, but now that I write it I’m not really sure). Inviability depends on x-x interactions as well as a 3rd locus somewhere else. Should have typed this yesterday directly after the talk as I can’t remember the specific details. I talked with him later and it turns out that he’ll be starting as a professor soon and is looking for grad students.
Robin Hopkins discussed reinforcement among flowers in texas: blue in most of the range but red in the area of overlap. She had me pretty convinced that it was reinforcement: hybrids show really low fitness, but are common when flower color is the same between the two species. Also got into the mechanism of reinforcement: the butterfly pollinators have a preference for flowers of the same color - some like red, some like blue, but the ones that like red always go to red and the ones that like blue always go to blue. The one thing that I was confused about is that the preferences I just described operate in the area of sympatry, but not in the area of allopatry where pollinators have a distinct preference for blue. I’m not sure why it would be different as it’s the same species of butterfly that does the all pollinating. She also got into the genetics of flower color change from light blue to dark red, it’s a 2-locus, each with complete dominance (the standard 9:3:3:1 ratio). One loci controls brightness, one does red/blue. Yaniv asked afterward it it may be collapse rather than reinforcement though, but I had to run to the next talk and didn’t hear what she said. I’ll try to talk to Yaniv about it.
Matt Jones’ talk was great, it will be fantastic to have him in the lab.
Amanda Moehring claimed to have found the first speciation gene for a behavioral trait in melanogaster but she didn't actually present any data, only asserted that it had an effect. I found it really frustrating as she showed images of her deletion mapping, but not any actual data about what the region she found actually does. Many of the speciation people were there (Matute, Noor, Yasir) just shaking their heads at her the whole time. It was one of these extraordinary claims that have no evidence supporting it. I talked to both Daniel Matute and Yasir about it later and neither were impressed. I’ll be looking up the papers and possibly writing more about it later.
I realized that I printed the wrong version of my poster and had to skip the poster session to re-print it, but I ended up getting together with Yasir and Erica and Ryan and Matt for some beers later.
Great first day.
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