BIOL 5240 Fall 2007

Ecological Genetics

 

Study Questions:

 

Colautti, R.I., M. Manca, M. Viljanen, H.A.M. Ketellars, H. Burgi, J. J. Macisaac, and D.D. Heath. 2005. Invasion genetics of the Eurasian spiny waterflea: evidence for bottlenecks and gene flow using microsatellites.  Molecular Ecology 14:1869-1879.

 

  1. What kind of very practical information can ecological geneticists provide to conservation managers with this kind of study?  How can this information be used in the real world?

 

  1. When an invasive species first colonizes a new area, we typically imagine that genetic diversity will be reduced due to the founding event followed by drift in small populations.  What evidence did the authors find that supports this hypothesis?  What evidence contracts this hypothesis?

 

  1. Why are microsattelites referred to as “high resolution” markers? (page 1870, second column, middle paragraph).

 

  1. How did pairwise comparisions of FST differ in this study:
    • among the European populations?
    • among the invasive US populations?
    • among European and US population?

 

  1. The author’s suggest that the facultative parthenogenetic life cycle of B. longimanus may influence their Hardy-Weinberg results.  How?

 

In this course, we could spend a lot of time on the nitty-gritty details of how to do molecular genetics or how to do specific statistical analyses.  Although this information is certainly interesting, worthy of study, and essential if you really would like to continue in this field, it is not the heart of the material in this Ecological Genetics course.  Our emphasis is on the application of these techniques to ecological questions.  If you want to really understand how to do molecular genetics or particular statistical analyses, you should take the relevant course work.  Nevertheless, when we read from the primary literature, there will be explanations of certain molecular and statistical techniques.  For those of you who don’t have the appropriate background to evaluate this information, please don’t get bogged down in the details.  For example, page 1871 has a section on how the microsattelites were found and developed (Microsatellite isolation and characterization) and a section on the world of software and types of analyses for the data (Statistical analyses).

 

I do expect you to understand what a microsattelite is and the meaning and implications of the various genetic parameters that were estimated.