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Deleterious interactions within the genome of hybrids can lower fitness and result in postzygotic reproductive isolation. Understanding the genetic basis of these deleterious interactions, known as Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities, is the subject of intense current study that seeks to elucidate the nature of these deleterious interactions. Hybrids from crosses of individuals from genetically divergent...
Rare syntenic conservation, sequence duplication, and the use of both DNA strands to encode genes are signature architectural features defining mitochondrial genomes of enoplean nematodes. These characteristics stand in contrast to the more conserved mitochondrial genome sizes and transcriptional organizations of mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) derived from chromadorean nematodes. To address the frequency...
Most species pairs are isolated through the collective action of a suite of barriers. Recent work has shown that cryptic barriers such as conspecific sperm precedence can be quite strong, suggesting that they evolve quickly. However, because the strength of multiple barriers has been formally quantified in very few systems, the relative speed with which conspecific sperm precedence evolves remains...
Despite persistent debate on the nature of species, the widespread adoption of Mayr’s biological species concept has led to a heavy emphasis on the importance of reproductive isolation to the speciation process. Equating the origin of species with the evolution of reproductive isolation has become common practice in the study of speciation, coincident with an increasing focus on elucidating the specific...
Hybridization is common among freshwater fishes, particular among the Cyprinidae. We used two mitochondrial genes and one nuclear gene to characterize hybridization among two species pairs of Cyprinella in southwestern North America. Genalogical patterns revealed that C. lutrensis and C. venusta are currently hybridizing in several localities producing apparent F1, F2 and backcross generations, yet...
The following syndrome of features occurs in several groups of phytophagous insects: (1) wingless females, (2) dispersal by larvae, (3) woody hosts, (4) extreme polyphagy, (5) high abundance, resulting in status as economic pests, (6) invasiveness, and (7) obligate parthenogenesis in some populations. If extreme polyphagy is defined as feeding on 20 or more families of hostplants, this syndrome is...
The neutral theory of molecular evolution (Kimura 1985) is the basis for most current statistical tests for detecting selection, mainly using polymorphism data within species, divergence data between species, and/or genomic structures like linkage disequilibrium (Wang et al. 2006). In most cases informative tests can only be constructed with ample variations within these parameters and many common...
The multiple species concepts currently in use by the scientific community (e.g. Morphological, Biological, Phylogenetic) are united in that they all aim to capture the process of divergence between populations. For example, the Biological Species Concept defines a species as a natural group of organisms that is reproductively isolated from other such groups. Here we synthesize nearly a century of...
Herbivorous beetles comprise a significant fraction of eukaryotic biodiversity and their plant-feeding adaptations make them notorious agricultural pests. Despite more than a century of research on their ecology and evolution, we know little about the diversity and function of their symbiotic microbial communities. Recent culture-independent molecular studies have shown that insects possess diverse...
Biological variation exists across a nested set of hierarchical levels from nucleotides within genes to populations within species to lineages within the tree of life. How selection acts across this hierarchy is a long-standing question in evolutionary biology. Recent studies have suggested that genome size is influenced largely by the balance of selection, mutation and drift in lineages with different...
The evidence supporting the recent hypothesis of a homoploid hybrid origin for the butterfly species Heliconius heurippa is evaluated. Data from selective breeding experiments, mate-choice studies, and a wide variety of DNA markers are reviewed, and an alternative hypothesis for the origin of the species and its close relatives is proposed. A scenario of occasional red wing-pattern mutations in peripheral...
The older history of hybrid zones is explored through consideration of recent advances in climatology, paleontology and phylogeography in the Late Cenozoic, particularly the Quaternary Period with its major climatic cycles. The fossil record shows that these ice ages and their nested millennial oscillations caused substantial changes in species distributions and with genetic evidence allows deduction...
A primary goal for evolutionary biology is to reveal the genetic basis for adaptive evolution and reproductive isolation. Using Z and E pheromone strains the European corn borer (ECB) moth, I address this problem through multilocus analyses of DNA polymorphism. I find that the locus Triose phosphate isomerase (Tpi) is a statistically significant outlier in coalescent simulations of demographic histories...
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