Published: Jul 30, 2024
Congratulations to Dr. Connor Murray and team on the new publication in Molecular Ecology.
This project examines the phylogeny of the Daphnia pulex species group, and identifies shared polymorphisms that exist between North American and European D. pulex.
There seem to be more shared polymorphisms than we’d expect from simple neutral models, suggesting either convergent evolution or ancient polymorphism that arose prior to the split of these two species 10MYA.
Remarkably, we find that there are shared haplotypes at a blue light opsin. We further show that these alleles at the BLOP affect swimming behavior and also affect fitness in the wild.
Read more about this cool study here in Molecular Ecology