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. 

Two exciting lab-meetings this week!

This week, I have the pleasure to announce two lab-meetings, one on Wednesday (10.00-12.00) and the other on Thursday (10.00-12.00). Both will take place in "Darwin", as usual. I hope as many as possible will come. There will be no article to read, but interesting research presentations.

On Wednesday, Shawn Kuchta and I will present our talks that we will give at the coming European Evolutionary Biology Meeting (ESEB), that will take place in Turin (Italy) next week. Shawn will talk about selective predation on wing morphology and geometric morphometrics in calopterygid damselflies, i. e. the work he has done during his two year postdoctoral visit in Lund. Shawn will present his talk in Turin in a symposium organized by me and Alexis Chaine about the role of ecology and selective agents in evolutionary biology studies. You can find the programme here for that symposium.

As for myself, I will talk about the genetics of life-history trade-off, which is the topic of a symposium at the ESEB-meeting where I have the pleasure of being an invited speaker (the other one being Derek Roff). Our presentations will be very informal, and there will be room for suggestions of how Shawn and I can improve our presentations. We are looking forward to your feedback!

On Thursday, my colleague Almut Kelber from the department of Cell- and Organismal Biology (COB) and her postdoc Miriam will visit us to talk a little bit about our collaboration that has been ongoing the last summer about sensory physiology, colour vision and colour physiology in our model damselfly species Ischnura elegans (see picture above!). I will also give a short presentation about damselflies as model organisms in ecology and evolution. Mirjam will bring fika, and I encourage all of you who might be interested in this to join in!