Kiwi 🇳🇿 Associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark working on modern and ancient genomics from various species.
Mick Westbury
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Check out this great post by @smilodontology.bsky.social on our recent paper using bowhead whale genomics and ecological modelling 🐋🐋🧬🧬
We additionally analysed population-level data from Germany (~40 kya) and Ireland (~11 kya).
The German and Irish individuals were genetically distinct, with the older German individuals showed higher genetic diversity.
🧬This deer has been cooking for awhile! 🍖🦌🧑🍳
We generated the first nuclear palaeogenomes for the extinct giant deer Megaloceros - arguably the biggest deer ever with antlers spanning up to ~3.5 m
Including one to ~50x!
Check out the preprint here
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵below
We identified two genes under strong positive selection:
• BNIPL, linked to apoptosis regulation
• SLC10A7, linked to skeletal development and bone mineralisation
These may relate to the giant body size and spectacular antlers of Megaloceros.
Our results showed that Megaloceros was sister to Dama (fallow deer), with a divergence around ~3.5 million years ago.
We also found evidence for gene flow with ancestral Cervus lineages, adding another layer to the complex evolutionary history of deer.
This one took many years to get here and wouldn't have been possible without the many coauthors
@mhssinding.bsky.social @emitruc.bsky.social @lovedalen.bsky.social @gingerhowley.bsky.social @patriciachrzan.bsky.social and many others who I do not have on bluesky
Across the dataset, we found evidence for long-term population decline, low genetic diversity, and an elevated burden of predicted deleterious alleles before extinction.
Want to do a PhD @universityofotago.bsky.social on climate impacts on #NZ vertebrates w/ Michael Knapp, @plubbe.bsky.social, @atennyson.bsky.social & me? Comes w/ fully funded scholarship & will investigate climate extinction risks using genomics & niche modelling evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldi...
