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. 

New logo and some words about our visitor statistics and blog impact

Posted by Erik Svensson

Our blog continues to attract many outside readers, since it was first launched some years ago. We have had aobut 93 000 downloads, although all not unique ones, and although some come from automatic web searches and machines, I still think that we can safely conclude that we have had thousands of human visitors. The number of downloads is currently about 1000 per month, which is a decline from about 7000 per month, before we changed the name and adress of the blog in August 2012. However, this cost in terms of lost visitors will probably be worth it in the long term, as we have a steady increase in visitors and the blog name is now more general and less person-centred.

Interestingly, the currently most popular and visited blog post of ours is the one where our new postdoc Lesley Lancaster was introduced to the other lab-members. This blog post has 1007 visits, which makes me wonder if Lesley is more famous and more popular than a post about Richard Dawkins who is number two, with only 845 downloads? Clearly, Lesley is a more up-and-coming scientist though, than Richard Dawkins who has passed his peak a long time ago. 

I have gotten many positive comments from colleagues from outside, as well as putative postdocs and PhD-students who have expressed interest in joining this laboratory. Several have also said that the combination of  laboratory experimental evolution approaches (flatworms and Drosophila) and field experimental work on non-classical model organisms (damselflies, lizards, birds) is a powerful and attractive combination. The new logo above should hopefully capture this synthetic spirit of our research laboratory. Below, you can download the new header of our blog and use as a logo if you wish, or promote us to interested collegues. 

Labmeeting on the genomics of species divergence

Posted by: Anna Runemark

For the upcoming labmeeting we will discuss the recent Nature-paper The genomic landscape of species divergence in Ficedula flycatchers (found here) where Ellegren et al. have studied the distribution of differentiated regions across the genome. I hope that the paper will stimulate discussions both on the genomics of speciation as well as on to which extent studying differences between diverged species is informative of speciation versus of differences that accumulate following speciation.

Since this paper is a quite short read I will also send out one of Lesley’s manuscripts which she is about to submit as voluntary extra reading. The paper is testing for assortative and disassortative mating preferences in the color polymorphic side blotched lizards (Uta stansburiana). This is interesting as conflicting sources of selection on polymorphic individuals are expected in this system: negative frequency dependent  selection (females should mate disassortatively with rare males to maximize fitness) and correlational selection (females should mate  assortatively to preserve co-adapted gene complexes).  I will send out the manuscript to the labmembers tonight.

I will bring fika!

Symposium on phenotypic plasticity in Lund: November 26-27 2012

Posted by Erik Svensson

Next week there will be no lab-meeting as there will instead be an exciting international symposium in our department on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity: November 26-27 (two full days). The program looks very exciting, with some wellknown researchers and international guests. For more information, contact Johan Hollander (johan.hollander@biol.lu.se).

Also, the week after there will not be a regular lab-meeting, as the Evolutionary Ecology Unit will have its annual "Christmas Meeting" between December 4 and 5. There will be research talks, social activites and Christmas Dinner. If you are affiliated with the Evolutionary Ecology Unit and would like to participate, contact Anne Fogelberg (anne.fogelberg@biol.lu.se) or Per Lundberg (per.lundberg@biol.lu.se).

Lab meeting Tuesday November 20th

Posted by Jessica Abbott

It's my turn to host the lab meeting next week, so I thought I'd continue the trend of picking unusual papers.  One that I think sounds interesting came to my attention the other day via the Oikos blog.  It's about red colouration in leaves, and whether this functions as a warning signal to herbivorous insects.  Anti-herbivory is one theory explaining why we see bright autumn colours, although the paper itself is a study of young plants.  Anyway, I thought that the question of why plant leaves can change colour might be a good subject for some discussion and speculation.  Usual time and place.


This picture is from Paudash Lake, which is fairly close to where I grew up.  I got it from Wikimedia Commons.

Here is the Oikos post, which gives some background on the paper: https://oikosjournal.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/why-red-leaves/

The paper:

Chen & Huang (2012) Red young leaves have less mechanical defence than green young leaves.  Oikos, in press.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ludwig.lub.lu.se/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2012.20852.x/pdf

Abstract:

In many plants, leaves that are young and/or old (senescent) are not green. One adaptive hypothesis proposed that leaf color change could be a warning signal reducing insect attack. If leaf coloration involves less herbivory, it remains unclear why leaves in many species are constantly green. To examine whether green leaves reduce herbivory by physical defense as an alternative to the supposed warning signal of red leaves, we conducted comparative analyses of leaf color and protective tissues of 76 woody species in spring. The protective features (trichomes, enhanced cuticle and multiple epidermis) and the distribution of red pigments within leaves were examined in both young and mature leaves. We observed that redness was more frequent in young leaves than in senescent leaves. Compared to 36 species with red young leaves, 40 species with green young leaves showed a significantly higher incidence of enhanced cuticle and trichomes in both phylogenetic and non-phylogenetic analyses. The phylogenetic analysis indicated that the multiple origins of mechanical protection were generally associated with loss of red coloration. Our finding of relatively poor mechanical protection in red young leaves provides additional evidence for the adaptive explanation of leaf color change.

Lab-meeting about developmental biology and our ongoing Drosophila-research

This coming Tuesday (November 6 2012), we will listen to an informal research presentation by our Japanese postdoc Natsu, who will tell us about her research progress on the genetics and function of Wing Interference Patterns (WIP:s) in Drosophila melanogaster. This is a collaborative project, involving Natsu, Jessica, Jostein Kjaerandsen and myself. Above, you see three of us and Yuma working in the laboratory, trying to get matings between males from inbred lines that differ in their WIP:s and wild-type females. Below that, you see some of the test vials where mate choice is taking place, in this case against black background, which is though to increase perception of the signal (WIP:s).

Time and place for lab-meeting as usual: "Argumentet" at 10.30 (Wednesday, November 6). Natsu will also tell us a little about her PhD-work on plant developmental biology, that took place in Japan, before she came to Lund for her postdoc to work on Drosophila. It should be very interesting, I hope. I also hope that Natsu can bring some unusual "fika", hopefully with Japanese touch :).

Most welcome!

Congratulations to Maren Wellenreuther for obtaining "Junior Project Grant"

The Swedish Research Council (VR) recently announced its grants decision for 2012, and I am happy to congratulate one of our lab-members and current postdoc Maren Wellenreuther, to have obtained a "Junior Project Grant" for the next four years. These highly attractive but competitive grants is one way of entering the job market and path towards a research or faculty position in Sweden. Competition was severe this year, as previous years, with only about 16 % of all applications being granted. Well done Maren! It will be exciting to follow Marens research the coming  years, which will focus on chromosomal inversions and evolutionary divergence in seaweed flies around the coasts of Scandinavia.

Last year Jessica Abbott got a similar grant, and it continues to go very well for young researchers both within our lab and in the rest of the Biology Department in Lund. I also encourage those of you who applied this year and did not get a grant (no one mentioned, but nobody forgotten), to not give up but try again next year. Competition is severe, and margins are often tight, but it is necessary to be persistent and believe in one's idéas. I, for myself, is also very happy and grateful that I got a grant this year, and I am looking forward to not have to apply for a while, but concentrate on research.

Lastly, I would like to congratulate former PhD-student Anna Runemark, who recently got one of her thesis-papers accepted in Molecular Ecology: a study on the relationship between inbreeding depression and secondary sexual character divergence in islant populations of Podarcis-lizards. I wish Anna all luck as she awaits the postdoctoral grant decisions from VR and EU/Marie Curie later this year.