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Patrik Nosil and Tim Farkas are currently in the field in California, studying speciation in their model system of Timema walking-sticks. Patrik reports that the work is going very well, but he also wanted to share a spate good news.

During his year in Germany, Patrik established a collaboration with Jeff Feder, and evolutionary biologist at Notre Dame. They have been studying the genomics of speciation, and their efforts are coming to fruition.

Patrik writes:

Much progress has been made in understanding the genetic basis of speciation; many individual “speciation genes” have now been identified that cause reproductive isolation. Much less attention has been given to the causes and consequences of genome-wide patterns of divergence during speciation. Thus, major questions remain concerning how the individual speciation genes are arrayed within the genomes of actively diverging taxa, and how this affects speciation. Jeff and I have been empirically and theoretically exploring this genomic perspective of speciation.

Jeff and I have two theoretical papers now in press about how the effects of natural selection are expected to spread throughout the genome (both at Evolution). In an empirical and explicitly experimental test of these theories, we found that natural selection affects a much larger proportion of the genome than currently thought. These results highlight how the individual genes driving speciation can be embedded within an actively diverging genome. We are pleased to announce that this empirical study is accepted for publication in the Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. Please find the abstract for this empirical paper, and citation information for all three papers.

Another bit of good news is that a future graduate student (Aaron Comeault) who is joining my lab in September has been awarded a fellowship from Canada (NSERC) that is similar to an NSF pre-doc (21,000K per year over three years).

Michel, A.P., S. Sim, T. Powell, P. Nosil, and J.L. Feder. Widespread genomic divergence during sympatric speciation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA in press.

Feder, J.L., and P. Nosil. 2010. The efficacy of divergence hitchhiking in generating genomic islands during ecological speciation. Evolution in press.

Feder, J.L., and P. Nosil. 2009. Chromosomal inversions and species differences: when are genes affecting adaptive divergence and reproductive isolation expected to reside within inversions? Evolution 63: 3061-3075.