Articles tagged Population Genetics
(74 results)

In 1931, Sewall Wright—a quiet American geneticist specializing in livestock and guinea pigs—published a GENETICS paper that changed how we study evolution. Wright’s “Evolution in Mendelian populations” was one of the founding documents of population genetics and was among the first formal frameworks to reconcile Mendel’s laws of inheritance with Darwin’s vision of natural selection.…

On November 11, 1954, Syuiti Mori turned out the lights on a small group of fruit flies. More than sixty years later, the descendents of those flies have adapted to life without light. These flies—a variety now known as “Dark-fly”—outcompete their light-loving cousins when they live together in constant darkness, according to research reported in…

Short-read sequencing has fueled the acceleration of genetic research But though these next-generation methods are fast and efficient, they can’t do everything well. One important area in which short-reads fall short is detecting structural variants (SV), where chunks of the genome are deleted, inserted, repeated, inverted, or in some other way shuffled around compared to…

New Faculty Profiles showcase GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website.   Erik Andersen Assistant Professor of Molecular Biosciences (Since 2013) Northwestern University Lab website Personal Twitter: @ecandersen   Research program: My lab has broad interests…

The Committee on Gene Drive Research in Non-Human Organisms convened by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held an information gathering meeting on October 28, 2015, to consider the Science, Ethics and Governance Considerations for Gene Drive Research.  This meeting comes as a component of a large Gene Drive study, which is set to review the…

What if we could eradicate malaria by engineering a mosquito population that doesn’t transmit the disease? What if we could control invasive species that outcompete natural populations? What if we could get rid of insecticide-resistant pests not by developing new chemical treatments, but instead by changing the population itself and driving it toward extinction? Although…

Genes to Genomes asked Dr. Carolyn (Lindy) McBride (Princeton University), a recipient of the Rosalind Franklin Award for Young Investigators, to tell us about her research and what it means to receive the award. She was recognized for her Rosalind Franklin Award along with another recipient, Dr. Maria Barna, at the 2015 American Society of Human Genetics…

The federal regulatory policy in use today for biotechnology products, known as the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology, was created in 1986 through a joint effort between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation…

GSA is proud to congratulate GENETICS author John Novembre, who was recently named a 2015 MacArthur Fellow or “MacArthur Genius.”  Novembre is a computational biologist whose research focuses on understanding human evolutionary history. His research findings have improved the field’s knowledge of human migratory patterns and demonstrated a correlation between shared ancestral geography and genetic similarity among Europeans. These…

As ancient humans spread across the globe from their evolutionary birthplace in Africa, they tended to lose a little genetic diversity at each step along the way. New settlements were probably often founded by small groups that carried only a subset of the total diversity present in their homelands. Successive rounds of this “founder effect”…

A vast number of species depend on sexual reproduction for survival. Sex facilitates adaptation and rids populations of deleterious mutations. Despite the benefits of this process, sex can be remarkably costly and disrupt already advantageous genetic combinations. Only 20% of fungal species have been observed to reproduce sexually, and a long-standing mystery for researchers is…