Evolution conference
Happened towards the end of June and was pretty cool, apart from the odd horrifying realisation that the speaker doing this interesting study on birds killed them at the end and didn't even think it was wrong. Aaanyway, here are some things about it that I enjoyed:
Talks Relevant(ish) to Laidlaw project
* The speaker showed that using BUSTED, which detects selection, without accounting for synonymous rate variation across the genome, can give a huge number of false positives when there's no selection, and she made a version called BUSTED[S] that includes SRV.
* 'Extreme heterogeneity in sex chromosome differentiation and dosage compensation in livebearers' - the first demonstration of total sex chromosome dosage compensation in fish (possibly just teleosts)
* Talk: evidence in sticklebacks of sexually-antagonistic selection on a locus on a new sex chromosome
Talks relevant to my research at Brown
* 'The timing and geography of adaptive Neanderthal introgression in modern humans' - this is pretty much exactly my research topic but she did it completely differently which was very interesting, using ancient modern-human genomes. I had no idea there were so many of those.
* 'Leveraging both ancestral and derived information to detect local introgression' - this was done by someone in my lab, Lesly, who made a new version of the D-statistic called D+. Instead of using ABBA and BABA sites like D, D+ uses sites of shared ancestral alleles also so that the values don't swing as much from region to region just from not having many shared derived alleles.
Other Interesting Things
* Poster: A professor from Brown was presenting on mutations in which the sign of selection changes with population size. I thought it was interesting but he said in his poster 'It thus appears that sign inversion always occurs because the sign of the selection coefficient acting on a mutation evolves from negative to positive'. But when I asked him what about cases where a mutation is beneficial when rare but deleterious when common (e.g. density-dependent selection, Batesian mimicry), he didn't have an answer. He said he'd thought about it but couldn't answer so I thought it was weird he put that on the poster.
* Poster: genetic rescue with animals from other populations can introduce deleterious alleles because they were adaptive in the other location, not in this one (that wasn't the point of the poster, it just made me realise this)
* Poster: extending Fisher's geometric model to situations with conflict
* Poster: An example of a rock-paper-scissors evolutionary dynamic in one lineage in yeast, where ancestor A < B < C (final descendant) which is in turn < A. I thought this was interesting but it was assessed using competition assays and I would've been more convinced it showed what he was trying to show (that evolution doesn't always proceed upwards) if he had also measured absolute growth rate. He said the error bars on that are too big though.
* Talk: In a species of wasp with individual recognition, selection on that trait seems to have been the strongest selective pressure on them recently, not immunity or anything else.
* Talk: high genetic diversity can contribute to extinction in small populations, because of recessive deleterious alleles from the larger population
* Talk: sperm is degenerating in an asexual species of freshwater snail that occasionally produces males, showing reduced selection on males
* Talk: the adaptive value of males in a self-fertilizing hermaphroditic fish is that they survive better in stressful environmental conditions
* Talk: a new sexual signal is developing in crickets which is harder for a parasitic fly to hear.
* Talk: 'Can females differentially allocate resources to offspring sired by different males?' They still need to do more work on this but it seems like females provision placental resources differently to males from different populations (their own vs other) in a mixed brood.
* Talk: Exaggerated nuchal humps in Midas cichlids seem to be sexually attractive and also threatening to other males, but hinder swimming. It seems to follow Zahavi's handicap principle rather than Fisher's runaway process.
* Talk: 'Genomic consequences of UV sex chromosomes' - these are in moss, with males haploid V and females haploid U. I actually missed this talk but apparently the V has Ne twice as low as U and sexual selection is implicated (I'm interested in sex chromosome evolution, sexual selection and conflict, in case that wasn't obvious). They say they've made chromosome assemblies and RNAseq data.
Moving House
My aunt, who I'm staying with for the summer, moved house. That's been pretty chaotic with the viewings and actual moving, especially since that happened on Day 1 of the conference!
Leon's visit
Leon came over to visit for a week, which was great. We visited Boston together and saw the aquarium and Harvard (Trinity is much prettier). We didn't too much other tourism but that was okay because we got to hang out.
Duolingo 365
I hit a 365-day streak on Duolingo (but I did use 2 or 3 streak repairs on the way...yet somehow hit that on the same day as my one-year anniversary, strange. Possible a timezone issue)! For the last five years I've been doing French on it, and I recently started Hawaiian.
Work
Honestly couldn't tell you what I did in work in June, as I am unfortunately writing this on 19th July. I do know I spent two weeks doing the wrong thing after misinterpreting my supervisor and not asking for clarification! That said, I ended up using almost all of the techniques and skills I learned during those two weeks in my actual project, so not such a waste. Even the stuff I didn't use was good to learn about, like VCFs.
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Here are some of the graphs I made and emailed to myself - no quality guarantees, and in fact I know now I made mistakes in these ones that mean the data isn't right, so don't try to derive meaning from them!
I also had to go to my J1 Scholar Orientation like 3 or 4 weeks after I arrived, which felt silly, but the speaker was good and gave us a lot of info about tax and such.
Writing
I wrote, if I've calculated correctly, 42182 words in June for my novel. 22669 were words on the actual draft, while 19513 were outlining/planning. I've been tracking for the 100-4-100 challenge. I've been doing a lot of outlining, as you can tell - one round because I was leading up to a tricky scene and one in the last few days to get ready for July's Camp NaNo, in which I am planning to write 40,000 words on the draft. I outlined the book on lovely colour-coded Post-Its today! (The image is blurred to prevent spoilers.)
Reading
I completed my Goodreads 2019 Reading Challenge of 26 books this month, less than halfway through the year! While my reading slows down a LOT during the academic year, this is cool because I set my 2019 goal to be the number of books I read last year, so I've improved.
Books I read this month:
- Bridge to Terabithia (finished June 3) - 4*
- Internal Medicine (June 4) - 2*
- The Hate U Give (June 8) - 5*
- Find Your Why (June 9) - 2*
- Planet Earth is Blue (June 11) - 3*
- Two Like Me and You (June 16) - 3*
- Ricochet (June 27) - 2* - ARC from Netgalley for review
Lablinn/Scicomm
Worked on contacting cool scientists to make videos about what they do for a talk to 8-12 year old girls with the Stemettes in London - thanks so much to everyone who contributed! Also worked with the mentor group on setting up a science fair Q & A service which is now, as of mid-July, live at reddit.com/r/AskAYoungScientist.
Child Abuse Post
Honestly not very keen on talking about this publicly again but anyway, the head of the Garda protective services division in Ireland saw my post and we' re going to meet in August when I return to Ireland, so hopefully things can get better. There's a chance.
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