Adaptation to ecologically distinct environments can coincide with the emergence of reproductive barriers. The outcome of this process is highly variable and can range along a continuum from weak population differentiation all the way to complete, genome-wide divergence. The factors determining how far diverging taxa will move along this continuum remain poorly understood but are most profitabl...

The molecular clock is a valuable and widely used tool for estimating evolutionary rates and timescales in biological research. There has been considerable progress in the theory and practice of molecular clocks over the past five decades. Although the idea of a molecular clock was originally put forward in the context of protein evolution and advanced using various biochemical techniques, it i...

We reported 31 microsatellite markers that have been developed from microsatellite-enriched and direct shotgun pyrosequencing libraries of Plasmopara viticola, the causal agent of grapevine downy mildew. These markers were optimized for population genetics applications and used to characterize 96 P. viticola isolates from three European and three North American populations.

We used 320 young-of-the-year (YOY) specimens of the highly migratory and overfished Atlantic bluefin tuna, Thunnus thynnus, Linnaeus 1758, to evaluate the hypothesis that Atlantic bluefin tuna comprises 2 stocks with spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Mediterranean Sea. Significant genetic differentiation at 8 nuclear microsatellite loci (F(ST) = 0.0059, P = 0.0005) and at the m...

We report the development of 18 new polymorphic microsatellite DNA markers derived from Crassostrea gigas expressed sequences tags. Genotyping of 48 wild adult oysters sampled from Marennes-Oléron bay (France) revealed 12 to 48 alleles per locus. Observed and expected heterozygosity levels ranged from 0.64 to 1 and from 0.77 to 0.97, respectively. The development of these new markers creates a ...

The fitness consequences of heterozygosity and the mechanisms underpinning them are still highly controversial. Using capture-mark-recapture models, we investigated the effects of individual heterozygosity, measured at 16 microsatellite markers, on age-dependent survival and access to dominance in a socially monogamous mammalian species, the alpine marmot. We found a positive correlation betwee...

Results We showed that the DYS458.2 allelic innovation arose independently on at least two distinctive binary haplogroup backgrounds and possibly a third as well. The partial allele length pattern was fixed in all haplogroup J1 chromosomes examined, including its known rare sub-haplogroups. Within the alternative R1b3 associated M405 defined sub-haplogroup, both DYS458.0 and DYS458.2 allele cla...