Merry Christmas and Happy New EXEB-year!

Posted by Erik Svensson

The year 2015 is approaching the end, and I wish all EXEB-members a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I think we have had a great year and many exciting and intellectually stimulating lab-meetings where (at least I) have learned a lot and got many new insights. EXEB has grown rapidly in short time - particularly since Tobias Uller have recruited several new co-workers - and we do now also have several hardworking interns, field assistants, laboratory assistants, PhD-students, Master's students and postdocs. All our permanent and temporary co-workers - nobody mentioned, nobody forgotten - do a tremendous job, both in terms of actual work performed, but also in contributing to a friendly and intellectually stimulating research environment.

Some statistics: If we count only the "core" EXEB members (who are in Lund and have formal positions), we are 11 in total (3 PI:s, 3 PhD-students, 4 postdocs and one research engineer). Counting a bit more generously, we are 13, since we have two affiliated PhD-students from Sussex University (Katrine Lund-Hansen)  and Manchester University (Miguel Gomez), who Jessica Abbott and I are co-advisors of, respectively.

Looking back upon 2015 in terms of research achievements, it has been a very succesful year, I think we can say without any hesitation. I have not made an official tally of joint publications, but I note that Tobias team had an interesting article about asymmetric species interactions in hybrid zones of lizards in Ecology Letters, and Jessica published a model paper about how self-fertilization and inbreeding might limit sexual antagonism in Journal of Evolutionary Biology. As for myself, I was happy to get our long-term time-series analysis of the signature of negative frequency-dependent selection in damselfly morphs published in American Naturalist. John Waller got his first thesis-chapter about imperfect detection and mark-recapture analysis of selection published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution. Lastly, and importantly, Jessica Abbott was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in October, the first of two at the Biology Department in Lund. All in all, a very succesful year for EXEB and its members, I think.

The future looks bright, I think, if the trend in 2015 will continue, but now for something lighter: the evolutionary origin of Santa Claus. It was Beatriz Willink pointed me to this very interesting blog post, which aims to do a phylogenetic analysis of the evolutionary origin and allopatric divergence of different Santa Claus phenotypes. It is from the blog "EEB and Flow", and R-code is provided, should you be interested in exploring this fascinating topic in depth. Enjoy!

Congratulations to Jessica Abbott for receiving ERC Starting Grant!

Posted by Erik Svensson 

Last Friday (October 9, 2015), our colleague and one of EXEB:s three PI:s Jessica Abbott found out that she has been awarded an "Starting Grant" from the European Research Council (ERC). This is a very large grant of up to 1.5 million Euro, spread out over a five-year period, and it is highly competitive and prestiguous. 

This ERC-grant will give Jessica the opportunity to further consolidate her research group and hire more postdocs and PhD-students, and will also give her higher job security, as she has sofar only been on a temporary position as Junior Researcher, funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR). It means that we can hopefully soon look forward to see some new faces in the form of students and postdocs at future EXEB-meetings. This will of course further strengthen an already strong and intellectually stimulating scientific environment.

This was the third time Jessica applied for these ERC-grants, and likewise the third time she went to Brussels for an interview with the evaluation panel. Jessica has worked long and hard to get this grant, and she should therefore be proud of this strong achievement. It is the first ERC-grant awarded to any researcher at the Department of Biology in Lund, but hopefully Jessica's example will inspire others to follow in her footsteps.

On behalf of myself, EXEB and many other of our colleagues in the Biology Department and the Evolutionary Ecology Unit, we hereby congratulate Jessica to her achievement. Well done! I am sure you will use this grant money wisely to consolidate your group and develop your research programme further.

 

Happy New EXEB year 2015!

Posted by Erik Svensson

On behalf of myself and all EXEB members, I wish us all a Happy New 2015, and I hope it will be a succesful as 2014 was. Here, I briefly summarize my own subjective impressions of the past year and speculate a little bit about the future.

2014 was very dynamic and a lot of positive things happened. Maren Wellenreuther and Machteld Verzijden got new jobs and moved to Denmark and New Zeeland, respectively. Tobias Uller started his position in Lund on 50 %, while finishing his position in Oxford. Viktor Nilsson-Örtman and Katie Duryea both got postdoctoral scholarships, from The Swedish Research Council (VR) and The National Science Foundation (NSF) and thus joined EXEB. Beatriz Willink started as a PhD-position in August. Thus, both influx and outflux in terms of members, and currently Tobias is in the process of recruiting several postdocs, so I anticipate that the EXEB meetings will be enriched by new faces with interesting new backgrounds soon.

In terms of major research grants, it has also been a succesful year. Both Jessica and I got grants from the Crafoord Foundation this spring, and Tobias got a three-year grant from the Swedish Research Council in November. It is if course very satisfying to get these grants, given the stiff competition and small margins these days, as they also help us to do the research we really want to do.

Publication-wise, it has also been a good year, with articles appearing in many good journals. For me and Jessica, perhaps the highlight was our PNAS-article about sexual selection on Wing Interference Patterns (WIP:s) in Drosophila melanogaster, and all the media attention it got. Tobias and his co-workers made a splash in Nature in October this year with their provocative essay "Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?", which also resulted in a discussion on this blog.

What about 2015 and the future? I am optimistic in both the short- and the long-term. I feel that we have been able to build a creative space for us as PI:s and for our students and postdocs and that we have an excellent platform to strengthen evolutionary biology in Lund within our department. It is now almost five years since the Department of Biology in Lund was formed as a merger between two old departments: The Department of Ecology and the Department of Cell- and Organismal Biology (COB). Evolutionary biology has, for several complex and historical reasons, not had a very strong visible profile in Lund.

The reasons for this historical neglect of evolutionary biology in Lund are both structural and a result of strong  and very biased personal opinions by past and some current leaders of our department. For several reasons (I strongly disagree with these views, however), evolutionary biology has not been percceived as a "real" or independent research field in Lund. Worse, it has sometimes even been dismissed by some with the argument that "everybody does evolutionary biology" or even "we should leave evolutionary biology to Uppsala instead, it is they who have an Evolutionary Biology Centre (EBC)".

Needless to say, I think these views are both wrong and outdated, but their existence points to some of the problems that we have ahead of us if we want to strengthen the evolutionary biology profile in Lund. I feel that it is more or less futile to try to convince the leadership at the department as a whole that evolutionary biology should become of one of Lund's profile research areas, because conservatism tends to increase up along the career ladder.

Instead, we need to build from below, by setting a good example: by recruiting excellent postdocs and PhD-students (which we do already have), by getting grants and by publishing our research in excellent high-quality scientific journals. Then, and only then, can we influence the department at the higher level and force the leadership to admit that evolutionary biology is indeed an independent and interesting research field in itself that deserves some higher recognition than it currently has got. And to achieve this goal, we should try to keep EXEB what it is already: an intellectually very dynamic research environment where we regularly meet and discuss science and exchange idéas, co-supervise students and postdocs and share equipment, skills and knowledge.

We should of course always be aware of the competition with other groups - both from within the department and from outside - but also do not hesitate to collaborate with other groups, such as the Theoretical and Population Ecology Group or Molecular Ecology and Evolution Laboratory, when it can help us to achieve our long-term goals to influence the Biology Department and strengthen evolutionary biology in Lund. 

Thankyou all for a very nice 2014 and see you again in 2015!

And now for some public outreach: About sex in humans and insects in "Bildningsbyrån" (Swedish Radio, P1)

Posted by Erik Svensson

I think most of us agree that public outreach and popular science is important, but it is easy to forget in the international world of Lund University that there is also a large Swedish audience who mainly listens to Sveriges Radio (SR), and its channel P1, and quite seldom read English scientific litterature (by the way, P1 is my personal favourite radio channel)

Although one does not reach (potentially) as many people in media channels which are restricted to Swedish, the response is usually very good, and it is often very appreciated. Likewise, I think it is important also to give popular science talks in Swedish, e. g. at "Gymnasiedagarna", as there are many swedes who, although they speak English, are not as familiar with the technical language of science. It is important to interact with your local community, as a scientist, and not only internationally, I think. After all, we live in Sweden, and it is the Swedish taxpayers money which are largely funding our research. They deserve to get some information about how their tax money is spent and why research is useful to the society (not necessarily restricting "useful" to economic benefits, of course).

Recently, Jessica Abbott and I were interviewed in the radio programme "Bildningsbyrån" in a series about sexuality. We were both interviewed in our profession as evolutionary biologists, and the interviewer was interested in what inferences that can be drawn from animal studies to understand sexual behaviour in humans. I think it became a nice and balanced interview, which I am certainly not embarrassed over. You can listen to it here, where the programme will be available for a couple of months. Enjoy!

På svenska:

Min kollega och jag blev nyligen intervjuade i radioprogrammet "Bildningsbyrån", som har en serie i sommar som handlar om sex.  Vi intervjuades som evolutionsbiologer och diskussionen handlar bl. a. om vilka paralleller som kan dras (eller inte dras!) mellan insekters sexualbeteenden och människors, samt vad modern evolutionsbiologi säger i detta ämne. Lyssna gärna här, programmet ligger uppe några månader till. 

Workshop on "Behaviour and Speciation" in Oslo

This is a quick greeting and update from Oslo (Norway), where I have participated in a very stimulating research workshop entitled "Behaviour and Speciation", funded by FroSpects and organized by Glenn-Peter Saetre at CEES (Oslo). There were a number of interesting talks by invited speakers, including from Ole Seehausen, Lee Dugatkin, Darren Irwin and Anna Qvarnström, to mention only a few. It was nice to meet friends and colleauges like Darren who I have not seen for ten years, i. e. since he was postdoc in Lund.

It was also nice to meet former PhD-student Fabrice Eroukhmanoff (see picture above), who seems to be doing very well in his new research group and who now works in transgressive hybridization in a homoploid hybrid species of Passer-sparrow and its effects on various phenotypic traits, including beak morphology and beak allometry. Fabrice, Glenn-Peter and several others from the "Sparrow-group" gave several interesting talks about the ongoing work in this fascinating system where genomic, phenotypic and ecological data are now being put together to reveal a complicated but interesting speciation history.

I am writing this post from Fabrice's apartment in Oslo, where I am staying two nights before continuing to North Carolina and the NESCent-meeting about "Environmental determinants of selection". I was of course also pleased to hear that EXEB lab-member in Lund Jessica Abbott have been shortlisted for interview in her application for a "Startup Grant" for junior researcher to the European Research Council (ERC). Well done! An impressive achievement to make it this far, irrespective of the outcome during the interview in Brussels in April, I think.

Anna Runemark receives postdoctoral research grant from the Swedish Research Council

It is with great pleasure and happiness that we note that Anna Runemark, who defended her PhD-student in May earlier this year, has received a prestiguous postdoctoral grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR). Congratulations Anna! This requires celebration with some sparkling wine at tomorrow's lab-meeting (December 11 at 10.30). The new postdoctoral grant system means that Anna will be employed at the Biology Department in Lund, being part of our lab, but will work abroad at the University of Oslo (Norway) for two of the coming three years. She will then perform research on the genomic consequences of homoploid hybridization among Passer-sparrows in southern Europe. 

Anna's achievement is well-deserved and impressive, particularly in the light of the severe competition for such grants (23 % success rate). To my knowledge, Anna was the only evolutionary biologist this year who got such a postdoc among the natural sciences in Sweden. Anna's achievement is hers, and hers only, but as a former PhD-advisor I do of course take some pride too, and takes the opportunity to boost my already big ego a bit further. I am glad that Anna keeps up my good statistics in terms of former PhD-students who get VR-postdocs: She is number five, out of five in total, resulting in a 100 % success rate (future students in this lab should take it as an encouragement and not feel stressed about it, I hope). 

We also have several other reasons to celebrate tomorrow: our postdoc Maren Wellenreuther got a "Junior Researcher" grant from VR earlier in November this year, and I myself also got a four-year grant from the same agency. Further, Jessica Abbott recently got 380 000 SEK for  buying equipment to the fly lab, and Maren got 100 000 SEK from the "Nilsson-Ehle Foundation". All in all a very successful year for the lab members in terms o grants, and hopefully this will continue in the near future. 

These are achievements we all should be proud of, whether we actually got a grant or not ourselves, as research is a collective enterprise and scientists do not work in isolation. One colleague's success can largely be attributed to his/her colleagues too, who have contributed to create an intellectually and scientifically stimulating research environment, and this is true whether you are a PhD-advisor, professor, lecturer, postdoc, PhD- or Master's student. 

Happy Easter!

Posted by Erik Svensson

I wish all of you, readers and lab-members alike and whereever you are, a Happy Easter. For those of you who are spending part of the holidays in finishing your VR-applications, I hope you can take a few hours break from work.

As for next week, lab-meeting will take place on Wednesday April 11 at 13.30 in "Argumentet". Postdoc Miriam Henze from the "Vision Group" in the Biology Department will tell us a little bit about her ongoing work, progress and recent research results on sensory physiology of the fascinating model organism: the damselfly Ischnura elegans, and how males perceive the three different female colour morphs in this species.

After this, Jessica Abbott wants to have some input on a manuscript she is working on which is about epigenetic inheritance (or the lack thereof) in the charismatic fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Jessica will send out a copy of her manuscript later, so that we all can read it well before the meeting and give valuable input to Jessica. 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2012!

 Another year has soon passed, and I wish to say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you involved in research in lab. This includes both those of you who are currently in Lund, and those of you who are elsewhere in the world, such as in exotic countries like Norway and Australia.

The pictures above come from the Christmas Meeting in the new Evolutionary Ecology Unit, which was held last week. After talks in the afternoon by several group members and other colleagues in the new unit, it was time for the traditional Swedish Christmas Table, or "Julbord" As you see, Jessica Abbott participated too, after several years of exile in Canada and Uppsala. Jessica will start her new position in Lund in January 2012, after receiving her "Junior Project Grant" from Vetenskapsrådet in 2011. Tina Karlsson also participated, and she will leave to start her postdoc in Finland (Helsinkki) in May 2012.

The year 2011 was an extremely successful year for our lab, in terms of succesful grant applications. Apart from Jessica obtaining a VR-grant and Tina getting a postdoc-grant from VR, Fabrice Eroukhmanoff obtained an EU/Marie Curie postdoc in December, and Machteld Verzijden got extension on her postdoc from the Wennergren Foundation. Considering the severe competition for grants these days, I am both amazed and proud of these achievements of you guys. And you should be as well, of course.

The year 2011 was also  successful in terms of publishing, with nice papers in leading journals, such as Animal Behaviour, BMC Evolutionary Biology, Heredity, Evolution, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, to name a few. We are clearly doing work that is interesting and relevant, and I have the feeling we are moving in the right direction to be even more succesful in the coming years.

Once again: Merry Christmas and enjoy the break! See you in 2012!

Congratulations to Tina for obtaining postdoctoral grant from The Swedish Research Council

Former PhD-student from our lab Kristina Karlsson-Green have just found out that she has been awarded a postdoctoral grant from "The Swedish Research Council" (VR), so that she can go to University of Helsinkki (Finland) for two  years and work with Junior Project Leader Dr. Anna-Liisa Laine, who is part of the famous "Metapopulation Ecology Research"-group lead by Professor Ilkka Hanski, who visited Lund and Sweden earlier this year when his research as a recipient of prestiguous "Crafoord Prize".

In Finland, Tina will work on a project with butterflies on the interface between sexual selection, parasites, host-pathogen interactions and trophic interactions. The study species will be the famous butterfly The Glanville Fritillary (Melitaea cinxia,; see picture above), who among its host plants also have Plantago lanceolata, which is infected by a fungal pathogen, which in turn has cascading effects at higher trophic interactions, such as those between the butterflies and parasitoids. This seems like an extremely exciting cutting-edge scientific project with links to community ecology, behavioural ecology and coevolutionary processes, and it will be very interesting to hear about the results from the planned studies.

Tina's success in obtaining one of these highly competitive postdoctoral research grant is mainly her own accomplishment, and shows her quality as an independent young scientist. Still, as former advisor, I feel very proud of her, as well as for my first PhD-student Jessica Abbott, who was able to obtain a "Junior Project Grant" earlier this month from VR.

Students and postdocs from this research lab are doing remarkably well in the stiff competition for grants and scholarships. Why this is so is up to others to analyze, and it is probably some kind of interaction effect between personalities in our group, as well as with other colleagues in our department. Whatever the reason(-s), I am very confident that these grants are not the last and that this positive trend  in grant success will continue in the future. The best thing we can do, and a good investment for the future, is to keep up with our regular lab-meetings and interesting scientific discussions about papers and science, encourage and stimulate each other, communicate our findings and joy on this blog and maintain a good spirit and positive attitude towards our work. In the end, I am convinced that these things are far more important than large grants.  Well done Tina!

Lab-meeting on how to write a succesful application to VR: Part 2

On Wednesday November 16 (update: 13.00!), we will have a follow-up lab-meeting about strategies how to write a succesful application to VR, particularly in relation to the new form of grant directed to young researchers: "Junior Project Grants". This time, we  have invited two of the succesful grantees this year: Jessica Abbott, and Olof Hellgren.

Both these young scientists will participate in the lab-meeting and share their experiences about the application process and participate in the discussion. They will also tell us a little about their projects and what they want to do in the future.

I will start the discussion by re-iterating some of the general points and messages from the previous meeting, and give some reflections of this year's outcome and what it might mean for the future.To celebrate Olof and Jessica, some "bubbly" champagne-like drink will be served, and Machteld has promised to bring some "fika".

I would also like to point out an interesting blog post about how to be succesful in writing research grant on the blog "The Professor is in". I got the hint about this blog from Brazilian graduate student Marcos Robalinho Lima. The particular post is entitled "Dr. Karen's Foolproof Grant Template" and you can find it here.


Time and place: Wednesday November 16 at 13.00 at in "Argumentet".

Welcome!

Dr. Jessica Abbott receives "Junior Project Grant" from the Swedish Research Council (VR) and moves to Lund

Some of the greatest moments of satisfaction in the life and career of scientists and teachers is when former PhD-students are succesful and able to obtain jobs and positions, especially these days with increasingly severe competition for research grants. It is therefore with great pleasure that I now note that Jessica Abbott, currently postdoc at the Evolutionary Biology Centre (EBC) in Uppsala, has received a so-called "Junior Project Grant" from the Swedish Research Council (VR).

As many regular readers of this blog probably already know, Jessica defended her PhD-thesis here in Lund in November 2006, with me as her main advisor. After her PhD-defence, she moved to Queens University (Canada) for a VR-funded postdoc in the laboratory of Adam Chippindale to work on intralocus sexual conflict over wing shape in fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster). She continued working with fruitflies also during her second postdoc in Ted Morrow's lab in Uppsala, but now using more transcriptomic techniques, such as microarrays, to study the expression profile consequences of intralocus sexual conflict.

Jessica will join the Evolutionary Ecology Unit in the Biology Department, and start up her own independent research project on intralocus sexual conflict in simultaneous hermaphrodites, using experimental evolution approaches on marine flatworms (see picture above), in collaboration with Lucas Schärer. We will hopefully hear more about these plans in a few weeks, as Jessica will come to this year's Christmas Meeting and party in the Evolutionary Ecology Unit. Jessica has also promised to write a blogpost soon where she will inform us a bit more. She will also come to our weekly lab-meeting on November 16, to share her experience on how to obtain a Junior Project Grant from VR (more info in a forthcoming blogpost).

The fact that Jessica now will bee able to establish herself as an independent senior researcher is not only good for herself, but also for the rest of us, as a new intellectual force with novel research techniques and study organisms  will come to us in Lund. Jessica will thus join our lab soon and will of course be active at lab-meetings and (hopefully) also soon be able to recruit PhD-student(-s) and/or postdocs.

As Jessica now will become another Principal Investigator (PI), I think that time is now very mature to re-name this blog ("Erik Svensson Research Laboratory"), which is to focussed on only one person, to something more general, which captures both mine and Jessica's research, and also opens up for future recruitments and establishments of new PI:s.

Ideally, a new name for this blog should be long-lasting, general, independent of study organisms or techniques, yet still capture the essence of research interests among the PI:s, postdocs and PhD-students. It could very well be a name consisting of several words, even an acronym, as the case of some of our sister blogs at other universities, like the  Eco-Evo, Evo-Eco, which was started by Andrew Hendry at McGill University, but which is a true group blog for his co-workers, just like I want this one to become in the future.

I therefore congratulate Jessica once again, and declare the competition for a new blog name that captures current and future research interests of this group open! There is no deadline to come in with suggestions, and you could either tell me directly, or write in the comments below this blog posts. I have already one possible name in mind, which I have discussed with Jessica, but wanted everyone to have the chance to come in with suggestions before I decide. There is no jury, and I am the only judge. Good arguments will be considered, especially if they take in to account the factors that I listed above (generality, likely duration and the possibility of future recruits and new PI:s).

Report from Uppsala: competition, ecological and non-ecological speciation

 Every now and then, one has to visit your enemy and competitor, as Richard Nixon realized in the early 1970'ties, when he visited The People's Republic of China, and shaked hand with communist leader Chairman Mao Zedong (see above). I imagine Nixon felt a bit unsecure when he, as an american, visited a traditional enemy on his home ground, almost like sticking your head in to the lion's den.

Uppsala and Lund Universities, being the oldest and most prestigious universities in Sweden, are often seen as competitors, but luckily we have not been close to armed conflict, like the US and China, and we are hopefully a bit closer to each other than Nixon and Mao. I was therefore honoured when I was offered to sit the thesis committé of Niclas Vallin, one of my colleage Anna Qvarnströms PhD-students, together with Prof. Andrew Hendry from McGill University (Canada). You probably remember that Andrew was also the opponent of my student Fabrice Eroukhmanoff in Lund, a couple of years ago, and then Anna Qvarnström was in the thesis-committe.

The current thesis by Vallin dealt with interspecific competition between flycatcher species on the island of Öland, and was a classical experimental field study which (almost refreshingly!) did not have a single chapter on molecular genetics, which is quite rare these days. Andrew writes a more thorough report about the thesis and its content on his research group blog "Eco-Evo-Evo-Eco".

On Thursday last week, Andrew and I also gave tandem talks at the Evolutionary Biology Centre (EBC) about the importance of ecological speciation, and its alternatives. We both took a critical look at ecological speciation, albeit from different angles, and Andrew writes more about it here.Briefly, Andrew questioned how often ecologically divergent selection leads to the completion of speciation, something which he calls "ecological non-speciation" , whereas I attacked ecological speciation with some examples of radiations which are unlikely to have speciated through ecological means and niche-based divergent selection, which we can call "non-ecological speciation".  

After long and scientific discussions over beers, wine and "Bäversnaps", Andrew and I agreed that we almost understood nothing, and that more research is clearly needed. I therefore would like to take the opportunity to, once again, advertise the ESF-workshop next year on non-adaptive and non-ecological speciation that will take place in Lund next year, on August 18 2012.

Lastly, I have to say I really enjoyed going to Uppsala (in spite of our historical antagonisms!), and to participate both in the thesis-committe of Niklas Vallin, and listen also to the thesis-defence of another PhD-student, Paolo Innocenti, who has worked on the transcriptomic consequences of sexual conflict in Drosophila. Interestingly, Paolo has worked both with Jessica Abbott and Tom Gosden, my two first PhD-students, so this is really a small world. And although Lund might still be the best university in Sweden, there is clearly room also for Uppsala, especially when they open up and collaborate with people from Lund.

Lab-meeting about intralocus sexual conflict and seminar by Jessica Abbott

This week's lab-meeting has been moved to Thursday morning (10.00-12.00) and to the seminar room "Fagus" (third floor above "Darwin"), due to the seminar by outside visitor and former lab-member Jessica Abbott in the same day, in the afternoon (14.00, "Blue Hall").

The theme of Jessica's talk will be intralocus sexual conflict and genetic constraints, and that will also be the theme of our lab-meeting. I was thinking that we should discuss a recent review by Jessica in Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. about how one can study intralocus sexual conflict in hermaphroditic animals. Hopefully, Jessica will arrive in time to comment on this paper as well, her expected arrival time to the Department is about 11.00.

Before we discuss Jessica's interesting review-paper, we will discuss a manuscript that I and Fabrice Eroukhmanoff have written about population variation in intersexual genetic correlations and sexual dimorphism in aquatic isopods (Asellus aquaticus). We have worked on this manuscript for quite a while and we would be interested in getting some input. The results have clear links to the research topic and interests by Jessica. We will send you out this manuscript in a separate e-mail, hopefully today (Monday). Send me an e-mail if you do not get it (erik.svensson@zooekol.lu.se).

After our lab-meeting in "Fagus", there will be opportunity to go for lunch with Jessica, and at 14.00 her seminar starts in the "Blue Hall" in the Ecology Building, entitled:


"Using sex-limited evolution to detect evolutionary constraints"

You can read more about Jessica's research here, and here you can find a list of past and more recent publications. 

On intralocus sexual conflict in hermaphroditic animals

Former lab-member Jessica Abbott, who defended her PhD-thesis in Lund in 2006 has a review-paper published in Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B., that can be found here. After finishing her PhD, Jessica moved for a two-year postdoc to Adam Chippindale's lab at Queens University in Canada, and then back to Sweden and Uppsala University (Ted Morrow's lab).

Jessica will visit the Biology Department in Lund on October 14 for a Thursday Seminar in the "Blue Hall" (14.00, Thursday 14 October 2010). One possibility would be to read her review-paper on our lab-meeting that week (Thursday October 13, at 10.15) to prepare for her talk. Here is the abstract of Jessica's article in Proceedings:


Intra-locus sexual conflict and sexually antagonistic genetic variation in hermaphroditic animals

Jessica K. Abbott

Abstract

Intra-locus sexual conflict results when sex-specific selection pressures for a given trait act against the intra-sexual genetic correlation for that trait. It has been found in a wide variety of taxa in both laboratory and natural populations, but the importance of intra-locus sexual conflict and sexually antagonistic genetic variation in hermaphroditic organisms has rarely been considered. This is not so surprising given the conceptual and theoretical association of intra-locus sexual conflict with sexual dimorphism, but there is no a priori reason why intra-locus sexual conflict cannot occur in hermaphroditic organisms as well. Here, I discuss the potential for intra-locus sexual conflict in hermaphroditic animals and review the available evidence for such conflict, and for the existence of sexually antagonistic genetic variation in hermaphrodites. I argue that mutations with asymmetric effects are particularly likely to be important in mediating sexual antagonism in hermaphroditic organisms. Moreover, sexually antagonistic genetic variation is likely to play an important role in inter-individual variation in sex allocation and in transitions to and from gonochorism (separate sexes) in simultaneous hermaphrodites. I also describe how sequential hermaphrodites may experience a unique form of intra-locus sexual conflict via antagonistic pleiotropy. Finally, I conclude with some suggestions for further research.

Former lab-member publishes paper on intralocus sexual conflict on wing shape and wing size

As a follow-up to my previous blogpost about intralocus sexual conflict, it is worth pointing to a new and interesting study by a former lab-member and PhD-student: Jessica Abbott (now postdoc in Ted Morrow's lab in Uppsala). Jessica has studied intralocus sexual conflict over wing size and wing shape in Drosophila melanogaster, during her first postdoc in Adam Chippindale's laboratory at Queens University (Canada). The paper will appear in Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and it can be downloaded here (scroll down the list of publications to the bottom), for those who are interested in details. An abstract is posted below.

The fascinating topic of the evolution of wing shape and the selection pressure operating on wings have also been subject of several other studies in our laboratory, mainly related to natural selection and predation on Calopteryx-wings. Like Jessica, we (Shawn Kuchta, I and Sophia Engel) have been using landmark-based geometric morphometric techniques to quantify wing shape and have been used these measures to estimate the strength of natural selection on wings. More will follow, and in addition to sexual selection and intralocus sexual conflict, natural selection is also likely to play a major role in shaping wing size and wing shape in both fruitflies, damselflies and other insects.

Abbott, J. K., Bedhomme, S., & Chippindale, A. K. (2010) Sexual conflict in wing size and shape in Drosophila melanogaster. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, in press.

Intralocus sexual conflict occurs when opposing selection pressures operate on loci expressed in both sexes, constraining the evolution of sexual dimorphism and displacing one or both sexes from their optimum. We eliminated intralocus conflict in Drosophila melanogaster by limiting transmission of all major chromosomes to males, thereby allowing them to win the intersexual tug-of-war. Here we show that this male-limited (ML) evolution treatment led to the evolution (in both sexes) of masculinized wing morphology, body size, growth rate, wing loading, and allometry. In addition to more male-like size and shape, ML evolution resulted in an increase in developmental stability for males. However females expressing ML chromosomes were less developmentally stable, suggesting that being ontogenetically more male-like was disruptive to development. We suggest that sexual selection over size and shape of the imago may therefore explain the persistence of substantial genetic variation in these characters and the ontogenetic processes underlying them.