Charting the Genomic Landscapes of Speciation – a Tale of Ugly Statistics and Pretty Butterflies

27 September 2018
4:00 PM

Speaker

Konrad Lohse, Ph.D.

Institute of Evolutionary Biology, Edinburgh University

We are interested in understanding how recent, population-level processes have shaped sequence variation in genomes. Our research combines the development of statistical methods for estimating population history from genomic data with empirical work on speciation and community evolution in a variety of (mainly) Insect systems including, desert flies, high alpine beetles parasitoid wasps and butterflies.
Laboratory webpage: http://lohse.bio.ed.ac.uk/research
If you are interested in joining the Lohse lab as a Ph.D. student, please get in touch: konrad.lohse@ed.ac.uk

Hosted by

Stuart Baird

About the lecture

We have known for some time that tight linkage between loci that are locally adaptive and/or control reproductive barriers between species should facilitate speciation in the face of gene flow. However, apart from a handful of spectacular exceptions, the search for speciation islands via simple outlier scans has proven a rather sobering exercise. I will introduce a maximum likelihood framework that allows to quantify the heterogeneity in divergence and gene flow along the genome and to model selective events that may be relevant for speciation. Using genome data both from Heliconius butterflies and a sister species pair of European Iphiclides butterflies as examples, I will discuss what we can hope to learn about speciation from such analyses.

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