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!

Welcome to Sophia Engel, our new postdoc!

This bloggpost has also been published on the CAnMove-blogg.

Together with my co-PI Anders Hedenström, I am pleased to introduce our first CAnMove postdoc Sophia Engel. Sophia will join CAnMove soon on a project dealing with insect flight adaptations and evolutionary ecology, dealing with adaptations for dispersal and predator avoidance. This is an exciting project that will combine field and wind tunnel studies, using moths and calopterygid damselflies as model organisms. Both Anders and I are thus extremely happy to host Sophia as a shared postdoc. Below, I will let Sophia introduce herself in her own words:

"I am interested in the interaction of physiological capabilities, ecology, and evolution in shaping a species’ life-history. My previous research has been at the interface of ecology and physiology: For my doctoral work I focused on avian migration. I combined wind tunnel studies and detailed measurements of water- and energy budgets at various ambient conditions with modeling approaches, and showed that dehydration can be a limiting factor for flight duration under naturalistic ambient conditions for my model species, the Rose-coloured Starling. A more recent project is focused on understanding the effects of climate variability on primary productivity, arthropod consumer performance and ultimately the structure and function of the food web in the Chihuahuan Desert of central New Mexico. I am looking forward to combine these two lines of research, wind tunnel studies and insect ecology, in the project “insect flight and morphological trade-offs” at the CAnMove center in Lund!"

Jessica Abbott: Summary of Research at Queen's

Erik asked me to post an update on the research I've been pursuing since joining the Chippindale lab in 2007. Since I've been in Kingston I've been conducting work on intralocus sexual conflict in Drosophila melanogaster. For those who aren't familiar with intralocus sexual conflict, it is related to the fact that males and females often have different reproductive interests, and therefore different phenotypic optima for a variety of traits. If antagonistic selection pressures are combined with positive intersexual genetic correlations for these traits, one or both sexes may be significantly displaced from their optimum. This displacement is known as intralocus sexual conflict, and has now been demonstrated in both natural and laboratory populations from a wide variety of taxa.

The Chippindale lab has used a powerful method for investigating intralocus sexual conflict: male-limited (ML) evolution in Drosophila melanogaster. When expression of specific haploid genomes was limited to males for over 80 generations, this resulted in an increase in fitness in ML males, and a parallel decrease in fitness in ML females. The phenotypic basis for these fitness differences has been shown to be linked to a displacement of both sexes closer to the male optimum in developmental time, body size, and reproductive behaviour. In addition, it has been demonstrated that intralocus sexual conflict can actually cancel out fitness benefits of sexual selection. When high quality females were mated to high quality males (as would be expected from female choice), this resulted in the production of low-quality offspring, due to the effects of intralocus sexual conflict.

After arriving at Queen's I started an investigation of patterns of phenotypic masculinization in ML flies. I also looked for evidence of increased developmental stability in experimental populations. Using geometric morphometric analysis of wing morphology, I found evidence of masculinization of wing size and wing shape in ML flies of both sexes. I also found increased developmental stability in ML males, which seems to have resulted in decreased developmental stability in ML females. This nicely parallels the results for fitness, where ML males had increased fitness and ML females had decreased fitness (relative to controls).

Because the ML lines had been maintained for over 80 generations when I arrived in 2007 there were concerns about their continued viability, and they were terminated shortly after I started working at Queen's. Once my analysis of wing morphology was finished I therefore decided to start a new male-limited evolution experiment of my own, this time focussing on the X-chromosome. This MLX experiment will also allow me to look at imprinting effects on fitness due to the nature of the experimental evolution protocol.

The protocol for ML X-chromosome evolution is as follows:
Males are mated to females with a double X-chromosome. These DX females (DX = double X) have two X-chromosomes connected at the centromere. They also possess a Y chromosome, so when DX females are mated to normal males, they produce sons that have inherited the Y chromosome from their mothers and the X-chromosome from their fathers. Triple-X and double-Y individuals are not viable. See figure (paternal sex chromosomes are shown in blue, maternal in red, and autosomes in grey).

This father-son transmission of the X-chromosome means that individual X-chromosomes are never expressed in females as long as males are mated to DX females generation after generation. Crucially, this results in male-limited evolution of the X-chromosome. In order to avoid clonal evolution approximately 4-10% recombination between X-chromosomes is allowed using a “recombination box” protocol (see Prasad et al., 2007 for details). This experiment is simultaneously being carried out for two different source populations (LH and Ives) which have completely different histories and culturing protocols. Within each source population I have three replicate populations of selected and control flies, with effective population sizes of 480 individuals for the LH populations and approximately 1500 individuals for the Ives populations. X-chromosomes are usually transmitted from father to daughter, so the father-son transmission generated by this experimental design means that it can be extended to investigate the importance of genomic imprinting to intralocus sexual conflict.

I expect to find similar results to the previous ML experiment (i.e. an increase in male fitness and decrease in female fitness) since the X-chromosome is predicted to be particularly rich in sexually antagonistic loci. I also expect to find a decrease in male fitness due to father-transmission of the X-chromosome. Since X's are usually transmitted father to daughter, you can expect that males might imprint their X chromosomes to benefit female fitness. A male with an X primed to be in a female may therefore have reduced fitness, and some preliminary evidence collected by Stéphanie Bedhomme (a former postdoc in the Chippindale lab) is consistent with this. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this study is that the MLX evolution protocol will potentially allow short-term evolution of the genomic imprint to adapt to father-son transmission. This is something I will also investigate. I'm currently in the middle of a preliminary fitness assay to investigate imprinting effects. I'm also planning a collaboration with Ted Morrow in Uppsala to look at differences in gene expression due to MLX evolution. I can post more about this later on.

So that's it for now. I'm also planning on running a reciprocal female-limited X-chromosome evolution experiment later on if possible, but I can write more about that later in that case.

A new postdoctoral co-worker: Welcome Machteld Verzijden!

I am pleased to announce that our laboratory will get another postdoc from 2010: Machteld Verzijden was awarded a postdoctoral grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR) this spring. Her research interests are focussed on animal behaviour, in particular animal communication systems and the role of learned mate preferences in sexual selection and speciation.

Machteld has previous research experience from birds (zebra finches) and fish (African mouthbrooding cichlids). It is a very talented young scientist that will soon join our laboratory, with some recent interesting and impressive publications in journals like Current Biology and Evolution. In Lund, Mactheld will study the mechanisms of mate preference learning in Calopteryx- damselflies, which will fit well in to our past and ongoing studies about the interplay between gene flow, sexual isolation and plasticity in mate preferences in these insects.

Machteld received her Ph.D. from Leiden University under the supervision of Prof. Carel Ten Cate. During her Ph.D., she did experimental work on the role of social learning in adult mate preferences in cichlid fish, as well as population genetic modelling work together with Prof. Maria Servedio, a leading theoretical evolutionary biologist. Currently, she is on her first postdoctoral stay in Texas, working on sexual selection and communication in fish in the laboratory of Prof. Gill Rosenthal. Machteld will thus bring some new insights and perspectives from her background in ethology and animal psychology, which will nicely complement the general ecological and population genetic focus of our current research.

As an aside, I note that I have been lucky to have been able to recruit so many good co-workers that have been so succesful in obtaining postdoctoral grants from VR: apart from Machteld, also Maren Wellenreuther, Thomas Gosden and Jessica Abbott have been succesful in obtaining these highly attractive and competitive postdoctoral grants. Although I cannot take much credit for Mactheld and Marens past achievements in any respect, given that their Ph.D.:s were obtained in other laboratories than mine, I sincerely hope that we will be equally succesful in the future. I also find it interesting that Machteld is my second "fish-postdoc" (the first one was Maren). I have yet to publish my first fish paper (if it will ever happen), and it is nice with people who are brave to switch study organisms. It is also, most likely, a good career move.