Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Hot Off the Press: Evolution 62(5)

The new editors will stop at nothing to spice up this journal; the May number's cover features two chickens doing the nasty. If you're interested in plant mating systems and genetics you're going to love this number. If you're looking for phylogenies, the reading material is less fertile. Hedtke et al. do some fairly standard phylogenetic analyses with Garli and MrBayes in their analysis of androgenesis (presence of father-only nuclear chromosomes in offspring) in the clam genus Corbicula. They use Brown & Lemmon's program MrConverge to diagnose convergence of their Bayesian analyses, but provide the same link for this program that has been down for weeks. There's also an intriguing paper by Egan et al. on the identification of host-specific loci using a genome scan. The approach uses >400 AFLPs to identify loci under selection in populations of beetles specialized for different host trees. It seems like a reasonable, if crude, option for identifying loci under selection in natural populations when candidate gene or QTL studies are not feasible.

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