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The Effect of Development and Ecology on the Evolution of Ovary Size in Drosophila
(2015-05-20)
How the size of an organ is established and altered during evolution is poorly understood. The ovary of fruit flies of the genus Drosophila serves as an interesting model for understanding organ size evolution, as the ...
Phylogeographic History and Temperature-Mediated Evolution of the Green Anole, Anolis Carolinensis
(2015-05-18)
Temperature plays an important role in shaping the form and function of every species. Ectothermic organisms are particularly sensitive to fluctuations in their thermal environment. Their inability to produce appreciable ...
Evolutionary Dynamics of a Multiple-Ploidy System in Arabidopsis Arenosa
(2015-05-18)
Whole-genome duplication (WGD), which leads to polyploidy, has been implicated in speciation and biological novelty. In plants, many species have experienced historical bouts of WGD or exhibit extant ploidy variation, which ...
Frontiers in Coalescent Theory: Pedigrees, Identity-by-Descent, and Sequentially Markov Coalescent Models
(2016-05-14)
The coalescent is a stochastic process that describes the genetic ancestry ofindividuals sampled from a population. It is one of the main tools of theoretical population genetics and has been used as the basis of many ...
Mode and Fidelity of Bacterial Symbiont Transmission and Its Impact on Symbiont Genome Evolution
(2016-05-18)
Mutualistic symbioses have enabled the colonization of novel habitats and niches in a large array of eukaryotic and bacterial taxa. Reliable mechanisms of symbiont transmission between host generations are necessary to ...
The Genetics of Life History Traits in the Fungus Neurospora crassa
(2016-05-13)
The study of life histories is fundamental to understanding why some organisms live for a very short time while others live for a long time, why some produce thousands of offspring while others produce one, or why some ...
Estimating TMRCA, Modeling the Fixed Pedigree, and the Effect of the Y Chromosome on the Chromatin Landscape
(2016-09-06)
This thesis consists of three chapters on different topics.
Chapter 1: We demonstrate the advantages of using information at many unlinked loci in order to better calibrate estimates of the time to the most recent common ...
The Genetic Basis of Behavior: Burrow Construction in Deer Mice (Genus Peromyscus)
(2015-05-20)
Understanding how complex, adaptive behavior evolves is a major goal of biological research. Phenotypic differences between closely-related species often arise due to evolution by natural selection and can be a powerful ...
The Genetics of Sexually Selected Male Reproductive Traits in Mice (Mus and Peromyscus Species)
(2015-05-16)
Sexual selection is rampant in Nature, and has produced some of the most beautiful and bizarre traits on Earth. Because females are often promiscuous, sexual selection can continue even after mating, as the sperm of multiple ...
Adaptation in the forest deer mouse: evolution, genetics, and development
(2015-05-16)
Variation in the shape, size, and number of segments along the vertebral column underlies a vast amount of vertebrate diversity. Although the molecular pathways controlling vertebrate segmentation during normal development ...