Evolution Conference 2013 - Sunday

I saw a long-tailed weasel near the main tent later in the day which was pretty exciting and Matt saw a moose in the parking lot that Kris and I ran down to try and find but couldn’t.

Talks-

Amy Dapper just presented some theory that the pattern of evolution of male reproductive genes is more consistent with a null of relaxed constraint rather than positive selection. It was quite interesting and based on a couple observations such as that sex-specific gene expression causes the selection coefficient to be reduced by half and that genes that select for highly competitive sperm are only actually beneficial when the female mates multiply (and with males who have different alleles at those loci). This causes the strength of selection to be scaled down even further by the harmonic mean of the number of mates. Her main result was to show that recently published dN/dS ratios that seem so high in male reproductive genes fall exactly on the null expectation of dN/dS that she calculated. It was interesting and she said that it should be published by the end of the summer. It may make a fun lab meeting paper to discuss once it's out.

David Gokhman presented new data on the epigenome (methylome specifically) of the neandertal and denisovan. He used the natural degradation of C->U and Cmeth->T to determine which bases in ancient dna was methylated. found that of the regions differentially methylated between humans and neandertals (Hox8,9,10) all control bone growth and expression correlates with patterns of neandertal morphology and known human pathology. Really cool.

Went to Zach Gompert’s talk - way over my head. I followed the selection equation parts and then once he actually got into the model I lost it.

Also attended Joan Roughgarden’s talk. Was not impressed. 

Matt Hahn discussed genomic islands of speciation and described how the divergence in these islands - when measured in an absolute manner, is incredibly low. The point is that while there is likely something - selection possibly -  driving the patterns of Fst that we identify as “islands” it does not mean that there is speciation with gene flow occurring. 

Dolph Schulter’s ASN presidential talk was interesting. He talked about the latitude-speciation correlation and if it exists or not, decided that ecological opportunity (which we can’t really measure) is really what drives everything. Talked about how the stickleback fish species are the result of repeated fixation of standing variation and how that doesn’t align with the standard thoughts about DMI’s - he has wide-scale additivity across many genes that seems to isolate species. Claimed that it was much different than the classic DMI model.