by The Lab

At our first lab meeting following the Evolution conference, we gave an overview of some of our favorite talks. These included…

• Todd Castoe‘s talk on snake genomics. Did you know snake blood is thick with fat after a meal? There genomes reflect the evolutionary changes required for an extraordinary metabolism.
• Jeff Leips‘ talk on finding the genetic basis of life-history traits like life span and fecundity in Drosophila. Using GWAS to identify candidate genes and RNAi to validate their influence on a trait, they showed evidence for the mutation accumulation theory of ageing.
• Jaideep Joshi created an agent based model illustrating the evolution of altruism in a spatially explicit environment with ‘cooperators’ and ‘defectors.’ This could be a new and interesting way to teach Hamilton’s rule in the classroom.