This week, I was thinking that we should discuss sexual dimorphism from two different perspectives: a "G-matrix" perspective and a gene expression perspective. The two different papers I have chosen hopefully shed different light on sexual selection and the process of sexual selection. The two papers show how sexual selection might leave a signature, either on the molecular level (the first paper) or on the trait-level (the second paper).
The first paper I would like to discuss is from Locke Rowe's group at University of Ontario (Canada), and you can download it here. I heard Locke give a talk about this at the European Evolutionary Biology Meeting ("ESEB") in Italy in August last year, and I already then thought that this was a very interesting subject.
In particular since most of us (at least me!) are not particularly interested in these novel molecular tools per se, but rather wish to understand how they can be used to illuminate problems and processes in phenotypic evolution, at the whole-organism level, I was thinking that we could get some idéa of how transcriptomics might be used to achieve this goal. Hopefully, we will have a good discussion about this on this coming lab-meeting.
The second paper is a more tradition quantitative-genetic study of intersexual genetic correlations by Steve Arnold's group, and this other paper can be downloaded here.
We meet at the usual time and place, i. e.:
Where: "Darwin" room, 2nd floor (Ecology Building)
When: Wednesday, May 5, at 10.15.
Hello lab,
ReplyDeletesorry, but I will not be able to come to the meeting this week. Have a good meeting though, it sounds very interesting.
Cheers, Maren