Many key bacterial pathogens are frequently carried asymptomatically, and the emergence and spread of these opportunistic pathogens can be driven, or mitigated, via demographic changes within the host population. These inter-host transmission dynamics combine with basic evolutionary parameters such as rates of mutation and recombination, population size and selection, to shape the genetic diver...

Many introduced species become invasive despite genetic bottlenecks that should, in theory, decrease the chances of invasion success. By contrast, population genetic bottlenecks have been hypothesized to increase the invasion success of unicolonial ants by increasing the genetic similarity between descendent populations, thus promoting co-operation. We investigated these alternate hypotheses in...

This overview develops new empirical models that can effectively document Gene × Environment (G×E) interactions in observational data. Current G×E studies are often unable to support causal inference because they use endogenous measures of the environment or fail to adequately address the nonrandom distribution of genes across environments, confounding estimates. Comprehensive measures of genet...

Genetic estimates of effective population size (Ne) are an established means to develop informed conservation policies. Another key goal to pursue the conservation of endangered species is keeping the connectivity across fragmented environments, to which genetic inferences of gene flow and dispersal greatly contribute. Most current statistical tools for estimating such population demographic pa...

Small populations are predicted to perform poorly relative to large populations when experiencing environmental change. To explore this prediction in nature, data from reciprocal transplant, common garden, and translocation studies were compared meta-analytically. We contrasted changes in performance resulting from transplantation to new environments among individuals originating from different...

“We‘re all Africa,” according to a line from the official song of the 2010 Fifa World Cup held in South Africa, Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”. And unlike John F. Kennedy’s tenuous claim to Berlinerdom, this statement of global solidarity and unity actually has a very sound scientific foundation. There is now overwhelming evidence and agreement that modern humans originated in Afr...

The effective population size (N(e)) is a fundamental parameter in population genetics that influences the rate of loss of genetic diversity. Sexual selection has the potential to reduce N(e) by causing the sex-specific distributions of individuals that successfully reproduce to diverge. To empirically estimate the effect of sexual selection on N(e), we obtained fitness distributions for males ...

Current human sequencing projects observe an abundance of extremely rare genetic variation, suggesting recent acceleration of population growth. To better understand the impact of such accelerating growth on the quantity and nature of genetic variation, we present a new class of models capable of incorporating faster than exponential growth in a coalescent framework. Our work shows that such ac...