NERC Research Fellow at Uni. Glasgow |
Evolutionary Genomics & Gene Regulation | Sometimes fisheries & pathogen genetics | Mostly fish & lampreys 🐟
Arne Jacobs
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I want to thank all my collaborators and colleagues in Glasgow and elsewhere that helped with sample collections. This was a massive team effort over many, many years and there is a lot more to come!
Lampreys are the only ancestrally parasitic vertebrates; yet have repeatedly evolved non-parasitic life-histories. Here, we describe the genetic basis of this fascinating life-history syndrome in European lamprey! 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
But we still found an inversion that segregates between ecotypes. Yet this is inconsistent across populations, with excess heterozygosity in non-parasitic forms. This (translocated) inversion is strongly associated with variation in sperm speed between ecotypes, an important fitness trait!
Excitingly, a large peak on chromosome 1 is not associated with an intraspecific rearragnements but shows low recombination in all forms. However, we found that ancient rearrangmenets might have led to recombination suppression, and facilitated divergence within European lamprey.
Compared to their migratory-parasitic sister species, non-parasitic lampreys don’t feed at all as adults, don’t migrate and rapidly mature. These forms have rapidly diverged and we found that this is associated with only a few genomic regions across their 82 chromosomes!
New publication with Peter Koene and Alexander Brinker (not on here), in which we show that non-native rainbow trout were introduce and have established multiple times from different sources in Southern Germany but show some repeated signals of naturalisation: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.
NEW: Global Assessment of Migratory Freshwater Fishes @worldwildlife.org
www.worldwildlife.org/publications...
“Vital freshwater fish migrations are collapsing; hundreds of species need urgent, coordinated cross-border action”
Please share!
