My first paper as a member of the Manthey lab is out in Biology Letters! We used whole genome data from a classic "great speciator" (the Solomon Island White-eyes) to explore the relationship between island size and genetic diversity. doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... - ThreadSky

ethanofthegulls.bsky.social • 30 days ago

My first paper as a member of the Manthey lab is out in Biology Letters! We used whole genome data from a classic "great speciator" (the Solomon Island White-eyes) to explore the relationship between island size and genetic diversity.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0692

Comments

ethanofthegulls.bsky.social•30 days ago

We leveraged the excellent museum collections from the archipelago to sequence 15 island populations and calculated a wide range of metrics impacted by the elevated drift on smaller islands, including nucleotide diversity, SMC-based effective pop size, ROH, and derived TEs.

ethanofthegulls.bsky.social•30 days ago

We found that most of these metrics correlated significantly with island size, showing the elevated role of drift in smaller islands. Note that this is the logarithm of island size, so it isn't a simple 1:1 relationship between Ne and our proxy for population size (think Lewontin's paradox).

ethanofthegulls.bsky.social•30 days ago

However, as you might expect, these variables are highly correlated with each other, both for the varied role pop size has on genomic diversity and analytical reasons. We attempted to disentangle them with LASSO regression, and inferred unique signals of derived TEs, ROH, and recent pop. size.

ethanofthegulls.bsky.social•30 days ago

Hope you enjoy this short-and-sweet exploration of the island size-diversity relationship, something I'm excited to explore more with a comparative dataset for the Solomons and with simulations (spoilers: not everything shows the pattern).

ethanofthegulls.bsky.social•30 days ago

Given the moment, I feel that it's worth mentioning the key role of museums and federal grants in this work. NSF funded some of the collecting and the sequencing for the project before I started at TTU, and my postdoc fellowship allowed me the flexibility to wrap up the stats and writing.

ethanofthegulls.bsky.social•30 days ago

Similarly, the samples here span 15 years of collecting, and the first ones were collected when I was in third grade. A continued reminder of how essential museums are to understanding and protecting our biodiversity.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply