Earlier this year I had listed six different PhD positions I had an interest in applying for. Well this project is none of those, although it is with one of the same labs. It was actually a rather quick turn around from first interview to acceptance. Roughly two weeks after the first interview I get an email back asking about this position and I jumped on it.
I will be studying unisexual salamanders on an island in the middle of Lake Erie. Within the Ambystoma genus there is a lineage of populations that are entirely female. This isn't all too unique as there are actually some lizards and at least one species of lizard that are entirely female. What makes this lineage so fascinating is that it can 'breed' with at least five different species!
Morphologically this unisexual clade can't be consistently distinguished from the population host species (afterall, they're hybrids in a sense). Instead there is a heavy reliance on genetic data to identify individuals in the unisexual group with mitochondrial DNA unique to this complex.
When doing some preliminary reading for the study I kept running across the term 'genomotype', which I thought was a Canadian spelling for genotype. I was wrong. After a bit I came to realise that it was actually in reference to the coding system used to signify the species genomes within the individual. Each individual of the unisexual complex can have anywhere between 2 and 5 sets of chromosomes, which can be from different species. As an example, an individual with an n of 3 (3 sets of chromosomes) could be identified as LLT (2 sets from A. laterale (L) and one from A. texanum (T)). Other species it has been known to hybridize with are A. barbouri (B), A. jeffersonianum (J), and A. tigirinum (Ti). It's an amazing system and makes for an amazing adaptive capacity for the lineage.
While my study won't be specifically on the genetics, I want to incorporate the genetics to some degree.
I still have some newt work to finish up, but I think I'm going to try and keep in contact with my replacements to hear about the progress.
I will be studying unisexual salamanders on an island in the middle of Lake Erie. Within the Ambystoma genus there is a lineage of populations that are entirely female. This isn't all too unique as there are actually some lizards and at least one species of lizard that are entirely female. What makes this lineage so fascinating is that it can 'breed' with at least five different species!
Morphologically this unisexual clade can't be consistently distinguished from the population host species (afterall, they're hybrids in a sense). Instead there is a heavy reliance on genetic data to identify individuals in the unisexual group with mitochondrial DNA unique to this complex.
When doing some preliminary reading for the study I kept running across the term 'genomotype', which I thought was a Canadian spelling for genotype. I was wrong. After a bit I came to realise that it was actually in reference to the coding system used to signify the species genomes within the individual. Each individual of the unisexual complex can have anywhere between 2 and 5 sets of chromosomes, which can be from different species. As an example, an individual with an n of 3 (3 sets of chromosomes) could be identified as LLT (2 sets from A. laterale (L) and one from A. texanum (T)). Other species it has been known to hybridize with are A. barbouri (B), A. jeffersonianum (J), and A. tigirinum (Ti). It's an amazing system and makes for an amazing adaptive capacity for the lineage.
While my study won't be specifically on the genetics, I want to incorporate the genetics to some degree.
I still have some newt work to finish up, but I think I'm going to try and keep in contact with my replacements to hear about the progress.
