Teaching

Second day of teaching Heather’s classes

BCOR

Regulation of gene expression. Lecture slides here and case study on quorum sensing. Note for future: ran out of time and only got through section 1 of the case study.

Population Genetics

Tutorial on using TASSEL for GWA mapping. PDF here. Note that TASSEL requires Java 7 installed on computer, and Mac users need to manually force the program to run (Ctl-click on file).

Biology seminar

Brian McGill

community assembly
regional pool
sampling with clumping
functional traits
traits are hierarchical
low-level traits (e.g. easy to measure ‘functional’ traits have low correlations and lower heritability. not necessarily indicative of the higher-level traits that may be predictive for species functioning and response
coordination among axes?
climate responses
non-stationarity: climate responses not consistent across species distribution
Gause Leibig
- plot abundance against environmental variable. for any single environmental variable, most points fall below 90% line (lower abundance than expected), but these points are at line for another environmental variable.
- can detect limiting factor at any point across range using this method
very cool result after being challenged by David Currier(?), McGill examined species abundance distributions in paleo records and compared to present distributions. intra-ocular test showed substantial change in niche envelope for most species. that is, little evidence for niche conservatism
competition interacts w/climate
filtering acts on individuals, so community assembly is at individual level