Andrew Kern
Senior Editor

Andrew Kern is an Evergreen Professor in the Department of Biology and the Institute for Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon. His research combines modern machine learning methods with classical probabilistic approaches and large-scale simulation to gain insight into population genetic and evolutionary biological questions. His lab focuses on methods development, creating new tools that empower the field to gain insights that weren’t attainable previously. One fundamental thread that has run through his entire research career is understanding the impact of natural selection on genetic variation in natural populations including models such as humans, mosquitoes, and fruit flies as well as non-model systems such as barnacles and octopuses.  He completed his ScB in Biology at Brown University and his PhD in Population Genetics at the University of California, Davis. Kern was an NIH Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he studied Computational Biology under the mentorship of David Haussler. Before arriving at the University of Oregon, Kern served as an Assistant Professor of Biology at Dartmouth College, and both an Assistant and Associate Professor of Genetics at Rutgers University.

Christelle Fraïsse
Associate Editor

Christelle Fraïsse is a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique researcher at Lille University working at the interface between theoretical and empirical evolutionary genetics. She is interested in understanding the evolutionary processes underlying speciation and adaptation, the determinants of selection efficacy and the evolution of sex chromosomes. Her lab combines theoretical modelling, computational methods and genomic data analyses. She received her PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Montpellier in France and pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria in the laboratories of Nick Barton and Beatriz Vicoso. She received an European Research Council Starting Grant to study the evolution of haplodiplontic plants.

Why Publish in GENETICS?

People have long been fascinated with birds, which exhibit one of the widest ranges of coloration among vertebrates. Parrots, in particular, have captivated humans by their ability to mimic human speech and spectacular plumage.

Brightly colored feathers are used primarily to attract mates, intimidate competitors, and protect birds from predators. Coloration is both environmentally and genetically mediated, and research into its genetic control can help us better understand its role in adaptation and survival.

Blue and yellow pigmentation combine to create the green hue—which blends well with the tree canopy—most commonly seen in wild parrots. In contrast, yellow alone is a popular color for captive-bred parrots. A study published in the February issue of G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics investigates the molecular basis of yellow color variations in three species of captive-bred parrots.

Parrots’ yellow coloration has connections to albinism in humans

Researchers at the University of the Negev, led by principal investigator Uri Abdu, report that a mutation in SLC45A2 is responsible for the sex-linked yellow phenotype seen in Psittacula krameri and two other parrot species.

Although most birds employ dietary carotenoid pigments for yellow coloration, parrots use a unique group of pigments called psittacofulvins. The blue color of parrot plumage is partly due to light scattering by nanostructures within the feathers. Data suggested that the presence of melanosomes also plays a role in producing blue coloration. In contrast, the absence of melanosomes allows the solitary expression of yellow coloration.

Breeder data indicates that the yellow parrot phenotype is usually sex-linked. Unlike humans, sex chromosomes in birds are designated as Z and W. The male is the homomorphic sex (ZZ), and the female is heteromorphic (ZW). Pedigree analysis from breeders who supplied birds for the study implied that the sex-linked yellow locus resided on the Z chromosome. Therefore, the researchers hypothesized that a defect in a melanin synthesis gene located on the Z chromosome was primarily responsible for the yellow phenotype.

Using whole-genome sequencing, researchers zeroed in on one Z-chromosome gene with the help of previously annotated budgerigar genome data. They found one protein-terminating nonsense mutation and three nonsynonymous SLC45A2 polymorphisms in yellow parrots that were absent in wild-type parrots. Parrots with this mutation “lose melanin in their entire bodies,” Abdu explains.

In humans, changes in this gene can lead to oculocutaneous albinism type 4 (OCA4), which causes very little pigmentation. One of the mutations found in yellow Psitticula krameri is reported in the human albinism database and is associated with OCA4. Although mutations that can lead to albinism affect many species, this study provides the first evidence of parrot color variation involving SLC45A2.

Better genetic understanding supports breeding and conservation efforts

Shatadru Ghosh Roy, a Ph.D. candidate in Abdu’s lab, explains that this research can save breeders time and produce healthier hatchlings. To maintain the coveted yellow color mutation, breeders traditionally bred siblings, which led to unhealthy hatchlings that often died from lethal mutations. Now that breeders know the genetic basis of yellow coloration, they can breed parrots from distinct bloodlines and avoid the negative effects of inbreeding.

Another takeaway from this work concerns the parrot as a model organism. Abdu considers the parrot an ideal model system for studying the physical and genetic mechanisms underlying avian coloration. After all, parrots have been bred in captivity for decades—indeed, half of all parrots alive live in captivity—and breeders can provide abundant genetic information. Hopefully, more basic biological studies on parrots will add to the knowledge needed to keep parrots alive in the wild. Coloration is part of the parrot puzzle, and additional genetic research into these fascinating birds may uncover strategies to fight the extinction of natural populations. With almost one-third of wild parrot species threatened with extinction, Polly needs all the help she can get.

An international collaboration reveals the genetic secrets of endangered species.

Butternuts are soft and oily, with a light walnut flavor that lingers on the tongue. But few Americans have tasted this endangered native. Now, University of Connecticut undergraduates have published the first full map of the unusual tree’s DNA in G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics.

The butternut is just the first in an ambitious effort to record the DNA of overlooked endangered species before they’re gone. Pumpkin ash, deep sea zigzag coral, and the red-vented cockatoo are a few of the other organisms whose genes are getting thoroughly sequenced by the Biodiversity and Conservation Genomics team at the University of Connecticut’s Institute for Systems Genomics. The program provides undergraduates with a full year of training in how to sequence, reconstruct, and describe the full genetic code of a single species. Other members of the team include Oxford Nanopore Technologies and scientists at the Institute for Systems Genomics (ISG). Students working on specific species also collaborate with people on the ground making restoration and conservation decisions. For the butternut, this includes the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

What all the organisms they’re sequencing have in common is that they are endangered species that don’t have a history of major agricultural, medical, or scientific uses.

The butternut Juglans cinerea, for example, is a species of walnut native to North America that looks similar to black walnut but has elongated nuts that are very oily. It was occasionally collected for its oil and harvested for its wood. Butternut trees are now disappearing as a fungus imported from Asia kills them off, with the few survivors tending not to be pure butternut but rather hybrids of Japanese walnut, which interbreeds with butternut easily and has some fungal resistance. Pumpkin ash is one of the 16 species of North American ash being killed off by emerald ash borer insects. The red-vented cockatoo is critically endangered by habitat loss and poaching for pets. And deep-sea corals are threatened by the acidification of the oceans, which threatens their ability to create their skeletons of calcium carbonate.

Many of these organisms are not well studied scientifically. Until recently it was extremely time consuming and costly to sequence an organism’s DNA. Often there are no reference genomes, or full sequences of their genetic code, for entire families of organisms.

“Deep sea coral genomes are incredibly sparse. There are two published out of 5,000 species! This one could be the third,” says ISG Director and genome biologist Rachel O’Neill, who is a co-investigator on the project.

Deep sea coral genomes are particularly interesting because deep water, much like ocean acidification, makes it difficult for corals to grab calcium carbonate out of the water, and yet deep sea corals manage to do it anyway. Understanding which of the genes make this possible could also help us understand how shallow water corals could survive acidification.

Other organisms might have other secrets. Fungal diseases spread by the horticultural trade are rapidly killing off trees in the great forests of Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Sequencing the genomes of related species that evolved with different diseases—such as the butternut and the Japanese walnut—could give valuable insights into which genes provide which type of resistance. It might enable us to save species by replacing a single gene. Even though the Japanese walnut is not endangered, the team is sequencing its genome this year, for this very reason.

“We’re interested in knowing how much of the butternut population is already hybridized with Japanese walnut, and what is contributing to the genetic resistance,” to the fungal infection, says computational biologist Jill Wegrzyn, lead investigator on the team.

And in addition to the practical interest in sequencing these genomes, it’s also interesting simply because they are different from anything else anyone has ever looked at. The ploidy, or number of chromosome copies, can be wildly different than anyone had assumed. Most animals are diploid: they have two copies of each chromosome, one from mom and one from dad. Some plants can be tri- or tetraploid, meaning they have three or four copies of each. But the pumpkin ash tree the team is sequencing this year goes way beyond.

“It’s…maybe…octaploid!” says Emily Strickland, a University of Connecticut student. She started work on the pumpkin ash as an independent research project, found it rather more complex than anyone expected, and is now working on it as part of the Biodiversity and Conservation Genomics team.

The program started last year with a grant from the University of Connecticut, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Earth and Its Future initiative, and has subsequently been supported by the ISG, with material support from Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Org.one, of which the Center for Genome Innovation in the ISG is an international partner. Org.one is an Oxford Nanopore project to develop high quality assemblies of the genomes of a number of critically endangered plant and animal species. Oxford Nanopore’s DNA/RNA sequencing technology offers real-time analysis that can sequence any length of fragment, from short to ultra-long, and flexibility that is necessary for assembling reference genomes. If the genome was a book, this would be whole phrases instead of single words, making it much faster to assemble.

For many of the 11 undergraduates on the project, this is their first research experience. And several of them chose it because of its practical impact.

“I really liked the idea of using computational techniques to solve problems immediately. On the conservation side, we can do so much,” says Emily Trybulec. She was one of the team members who sequenced the butternut genome last year and wrote the paper they’ve just published, and she’s returned as a mentor this year. Other students point out that doing real research as a part of this project is completely different from a typical classroom experience in which everything is designed to work.

“It forces you to reach out and collaborate, and look for answers yourself, before you ask for help,” Harshita Akella says.

The Biodiversity and Conservation Genomics team’s reference genome of the butternut tree can be found here: https://gitlab.com/PlantGenomicsLab/butternut-genome-assembly.

A new associate editor is joining GENETICS in population and evolutionary genetics. We’re excited to welcome Konrad Lohse to the editorial team.

Konrad Lohse
Associate Editor

Konrad Lohse is a population geneticist interested in learning about evolution in natural populations from genomic data. After a BSc at the University of St Andrews, he obtained a PhD at Edinburgh University under the mentorship of Nick Barton and Graham Stone working on inference of population history. Konrad is currently a Senior Lecturer at Edinburgh University, and he leads a research group that combines theoretical work on the coalescent with genomic studies of adaptation, chromosome evolution and speciation in insects (including various species of butterflies and Drosophila). His group has developed a coalescent-based method to scan genomes of recently diverged taxa for barriers to gene-flow.

A new associate editor is joining GENETICS in the population and evolutionary genetics section. We’re excited to welcome Thomas Lenormand to the editorial team.

Thomas Lenormand

Associate Editor

Thomas Lenormand is Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique research director at the CEFE laboratory. He is an evolutionary geneticist, combining mathematical theory, statistical developments, laboratory experiments, and field work. His work covers a wide range of issues at the intersection of evolution, genetics, and ecology. He is mainly interested in adaptation, the evolution of genetic systems (sex, asex, meiosis, recombination, sex chromosomes) and the effect of mutations. He was an editor and an associate editor of several evolutionary biology journals, twice an European Research Council laureate, and a Harvard Radcliffe fellow. He has received several awards, including the Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution.

Bioinformatics—a scientific discipline that aims to curate, analyze, and distribute biological data—is facing a crisis: a deluge of data is overwhelming laboratories and existing infrastructure. 

Biologists, especially those working in genome sciences, have recognized the importance of big data: in just two decades, the number of genome sequences has increased 10,000-fold (from 180,000 to 1.8 billion genomes) and the number of sequenced bases has increased 25,000-fold (from 640 million to 16 trillion bases). Such a rich collection of genome sequences rivals the esteemed Library of Alexandria, a prestigious collection of roughly half a million scrolls established in approximately 250 BCE.

Similar to the ancient Library of Alexandria, mystery shrouds the genomic library of today. Specifically, unraveling how the 1.8 billion genomes encode organismal complexity and their components—even in “simple” organisms like bacteria—remains a grand challenge. So, what stops us from understanding the link between the data we generate and their biological meaning? One major hurdle is both a challenge and an opportunity. 

The necessary infrastructure of supercomputers and widely distributed analytical pipelines for processing ever-increasing datasets are lacking. As the number of genomes available continues to increase, even as this article is being read, scalable solutions are needed. Cloud-based platforms promise a solution to overcome this hurdle and usher in a new era of understanding in biosciences. We provide an overview of major hurdles the field faces and describe how cloud-based infrastructure may be the silver lining for a rapidly growing field.

The data deluge

Biology generates massive amounts of data every year; almost 40 petabytes, which is roughly equivalent to the entire written works of humankind from the beginning of recorded history in all languages. Instead of simple text files, the types of data generated in biological studies are diverse. There are genome sequences, transcript and protein abundances, growth curves, species presence and abundance in specific environments, and imaging, just to name a few.

One major challenge is that heterogeneous data types are often stored in different formats, require different suites of software for processing and analysis, generate different output file formats, and may require additional software for creating human-interpretable representations of the data. The number of data types (and amount of data) will continue to rise with the advent of new technologies. Curating, storing, and distributing colossal datasets in diverse formats will require innovative solutions.

One solution is a collaboration between academic institutions and bioindustries. Specifically, the latter may have established a computational infrastructure that exceeds what is available to some academic groups; for example, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard use cloud-based platforms to distribute data generated by diverse research consortia.

Cloud analytics

In the future, all analysis and interpretation of biological data will be done using cloud analytics. With resources that vastly exceed the personal computer, desktops and laptops are shifting from analysis hubs to portals linking researchers to cloud architectures. For academic labs, this will drive down hardware costs because a personal computer will only need enough memory to maintain a stable connection to the cloud. That means inexpensive laptops, tablets, and even Raspberry Pis can act as portals to the cloud. Academic labs will no longer face other costs and headaches, such as the maintenance and management of computing infrastructure. 

Major research institutions have already migrated to cloud-based architectures. For example, the European Bioinformatics Institute uses Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud. Following increased demand, there are now numerous providers of cloud-based platforms: Rackspace, VMware, IBM, and Microsoft, among others. With the threat of slashed budgets for scientific research, these services are likely to become even more prominent in academia.

Overcoming (bioinformatics) supply chain issues

Despite advantages in data storage and analytic capacity, a major complexity remains: the development of toolkits and analytical workflows to carry out analyses. Let’s say a cancer biologist wants to investigate the genomic and transcriptomic signatures associated with pancreatic cancer. The researcher likely wants to automate a complete analysis, creating end-to-end bioinformatic processing and analysis to obtain meaningful results from raw data. Doing so requires multiple steps and the handling of diverse data formats. Suppose the researcher completed this herculean task by developing in-house software and a data management system. It would be an amazing feat, but how would it help a biologist studying, for example, colon cancer using a similar analysis for their experiment? This raises an issue of scale. Emailing codebases and describing workflows is a solution that can work for a few people, not many. However, platforms like GitHub offer developers a cloud-based distribution platform. Other distribution hubs like PyPi, Bioconda, and Bioconductor further help to disseminate software packages across the globe. User-friendly platforms like Galaxy, the CLC Workbench from Qiagen, and the console from LatchBio help researchers seamlessly stitch together software and more easily share workflows. Taken together, these advances make it easier for scientists to share their cloud-based work, leading to lower lab costs and a more accessible field of bioinformatics.

A bright future or dark days?

In the future, bioinformatics workflows will be available to academic and citizen scientists alike. With intuitively designed platforms, students in high school, or even elementary school, could conduct bioinformatic research. Imagine that: middle-grade science fairs could feature analysis of terabytes of data—that is amazing! For the readers skeptical of these claims, I urge you to consider the history of the microscope. The early days of microscopy required niche skillsets in lens manufacturing and engineering making microscopes a rare commodity. Since then, microscope manufacturing has improved resulting in lowered costs and allowing the masses to become microscopists. Case in point, a Stanford research group invented the Foldiscope, a paper microscope that has a magnification of 140x and costs less than a dollar. Bioinformatics is in the midst of the same revolution. With the appropriate distribution of tools and access portals to cloud-based infrastructures, everyone in the world can become a bioinformatician. Widely accessible resources, however, will pose new challenges.

In summary, as bioinformatics transitions to cloud-based infrastructures, researchers will find themselves empowered and enabled to conduct experiments all across the globe. Without careful consideration of the major problems, bioinformatics will stagnate or fail to uphold the tenets of scientific rigor and integrity. However, careful consideration of these issues in bioinformatics will steer the ongoing revolution toward an exciting and productive era of cloud-based computing systems, broadening the accessibility of bioinformatics research. The future of bioinformatics research is in the cloud. And behind the clouds, the sun is shining.

Jacob L. Steenwyk is a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Dr. Nicole King at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies genome function and evolution in animals and fungi and develops software for the life sciences.

Kyle Giffin is the co-founder and COO of LatchBio, a cloud infrastructure platform used by biotech companies and labs across the world. Previously at Berkeley, he studied computational & cognitive neuroscience, data science, and entrepreneurship, before leaving school to start Latch.

When female Anopheles mosquitoes take a blood meal from someone with malaria, a tiny Plasmodium parasite enters the mosquito’s digestive tract. That parasite can invade the mosquito’s salivary tissues, so when the insect takes another blood meal, the intruder can slip into the next human host and start a new malaria infection. Malaria is a life-threatening condition that infected 241 million people in 2020 and disproportionately affects vulnerable populations.

To combat the disease, researchers from the University of California, Irvine are developing genetically modified African malaria mosquitoes (Anopheles gambiae) that can’t transmit human malaria, alongside a gene-drive system that can quickly spread those genes and block the spread of the malaria parasite through the population. While this system usually operates with nearly 100 percent efficiency, a small number of mosquitoes will still wind up with mutant alleles that resist the gene drive. Could these mutant alleles sabotage the whole approach? In a paper published in GENETICS, Carballar-Lejarazú et al. looked at this phenomenon and found these mutations didn’t hamper the gene drive in their system.

Malaria-Resistant Mosquitoes

Contributing author Anthony James began exploring genetic methods for controlling vector-borne disease in the mid-1980s. Eventually he exploited mosquito genes that are only turned on in female mosquitoes after a blood meal and linked them with mouse antibodies that protect mice from human malaria parasites.

When these malaria-busting synthetic genes are inserted into mosquitoes, they can’t transmit malaria. And if it mates with a regular mosquito, the beneficial gene will be inherited like any other gene, gradually building up in the mosquito population. But what if that process could happen faster?

That’s when CRISPR gene editing technology hit the scene. “It seems like overnight when you work 10 or 15 years on something to make it work and then something new comes along and—in less than a year—you have it working,” says James.

Gene editing operates on the germline—the cells that will eventually become sperm or eggs—by snipping the normal chromosome and inserting the new sequence, in this case, the malaria fighting gene. In male mosquitoes, this works so well that each male passes on the new gene to nearly 100% of its offspring.

It’s a bit more complicated in female mosquitoes because egg cells are massive compared with sperm. When the system snips the normal chromosome and inserts the synthetic sequence, the second chromosome may be too far away to trigger the repair mechanism that sews the cut chromosome back up while including the system. That means there’s a chance the snipped chromosome will just stick itself back together—called nonhomologous end joining—possibly resulting in a mutant allele that resists the gene drive.

Exploring Gene Drive Mutations

To figure out if those mutant alleles could pose a problem for the gene drive system, the researchers linked the system to a somatic gene for eye color and marked it with a fluorescent protein. Then, the team performed various crosses to see how the genes passed on to future generations. Non-mutant progeny had black eyes (before adulthood) while those with the mutant allele had pink eyes. And all the progeny carrying the gene drive had eyes that fluoresced blue under light.

To make things a bit more complicated, some progeny were mosaics, with a mix of alleles and more complex eyes, but since the eye color gene isn’t part of the germline—it won’t pass on to the next generation—most of those mosaic mosquitoes still passed on the gene drive.

In the lab, about 25 percent of the first generation of progeny received the gene drive. By the fourth generation, the entire population had fluorescent blue eyes—meaning none of those mosquitoes could transmit malaria.

“Four generations is sufficient,” says James.  “That’s well short of one transmission season.”

James is quick to point out that this isn’t a magic bullet for malaria and there is more research to be done. There are also many thorny issues and debates for scientists and the broader community to work through before everyone is comfortable deploying gene drive mosquitoes in the wild. But James is hopeful the project to which he’s dedicated so many years may one day help ease the malaria crisis.

“There was a famous scientist who said a new idea doesn’t take hold because you change people’s minds; it takes hold because there’s a whole new generation of people that have grown up hearing about it,” says James. “I wish it was a little faster, but we’ll do our part, and hopefully people will take it up. It may not be me, but we have something to hand off.”

CITATION:

Cas9-mediated maternal effect and derived resistance alleles in a gene-drive strain of the African malaria vector mosquito, Anopheles gambiae

Rebeca Carballar-Lejarazú, Taylor Tushar, Thai Binh Pham, Anthony A James

GENETICS

2022: iyac055

https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyac055

Melissa Mayer is a freelance science writer based in Portland, Oregon.

Congratulations to the winners of the Editors’ Choice Awards for outstanding articles published in GENETICS in 2021! The journal’s Editorial Board considered a diverse range of articles, finding many papers worthy of recognition. After much deliberation, they settled on one exceptional article for each of the three award categories: molecular genetics, population and evolutionary genetics, and quantitative genetics. Check out some of the best GENETICS had to offer in 2021, and be sure to browse the full Spotlight collection.

EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARD IN MOLECULAR GENETICS

Neurogenesis in the adult Drosophila brain

Kassi L Crocker, Khailee Marischuk, Stacey A Rimkus, Hong Zhou, Jerry C P Yin, Grace Boekhoff-Falk

GENETICS Oct 2021, 219(2), iyab092, https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyab092

Crocker et al. describe the Drosophila central brain as a new model in which to investigate adult neurogenesis. The authors observe a significant increase in the number of proliferating cells following injury; they detect new glia, new neurons, and the formation of new axon tracts that target appropriate brain regions. The authors anticipate that this paradigm will facilitate the dissection of the mechanisms of neural regeneration and that these processes will be relevant to human brain repair.

EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARD IN POPULATION AND EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS

The timing of human adaptation from Neanderthal introgression

Sivan Yair, Kristin M Lee, Graham Coop

GENETICS May 2021, 218(1), iyab052, https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyab052

Some Neanderthal-introgressed alleles in modern human populations were adaptive; however, the context in which they provided a fitness advantage is unknown. Yair, Lee, and Coop develop a population genetic method that uses ancient DNA and the hitchhiking effect to determine when natural selection favored the spread of Neanderthal-introgressed alleles. They identify regions of the genome in which Neanderthal alleles were immediately adaptive and others in which there was a significant time lag between admixture and the allele’s rise in frequency.

EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARD IN QUANTITATIVE GENETICS

Why genetic selection to reduce the prevalence of infectious diseases is way more promising than currently believed

Andries D Hulst, Mart C M de Jong, Piter Bijma

GENETICS April 2021, 217(4), iyab024, https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyab024

Quantitative genetic analyses of binary disease status indicate low heritability for most infectious diseases, suggesting that the potential response to selection in disease prevalence is limited. By integration of quantitative genetics with epidemiological models, Hulst, de Jong, and Bijma show that the typical low heritability values of disease status correspond to a substantial genetic variation in disease susceptibility and to a large potential response to selection. Positive feedback mechanisms occurring in disease transmission are crucial for this response and even make eradication of infectious diseases possible. However, current quantitative genetic models ignore these feedback effects and thereby underestimate response to selection in disease prevalence.

Guest post by C Brandon Ogbunu.

2022 marks the return of the Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics (PEQG) Conference, organized by the Genetics Society of America. Part of the meeting’s popularity stems from being one of the few conferences that brings together leading thinkers in subfields of genetics that don’t typically overlap, across a range of model organisms, united by methods and perspectives.

The meeting, which will take place June 7-10 in Pacific Grove, CA, at Asilomar Conference Grounds, is well-known for its structure: a combination of keynote addresses, awards, and short talks of various kinds. One of the key aspects of this structure is the session chairs: junior scientists who have established themselves as leaders in the various areas of population, evolutionary, and quantitative genetics. During the meeting, they each chair a session full of talks, and give 30-minute talks of their own during the final keynote session. The session chairs provide an opportunity for us to view the present and future of the field.

The 2022 session chairs promise to deliver on this tradition, featuring a tremendous lineup of thinkers who study problems as diverse as speciation genomics in plants to epistasis in human genomic data sets. This specific collection of speakers displays both breadth and depth, and so the chair keynote session promises to excite.

Below I will highlight these session chairs, commenting briefly on why I am personally so excited to hear about their work.

Nancy Chen

Evolutionary biology is, in part, a science that is defined by information from the past, but how do we use it to ask questions about contemporary evolution in natural populations? These are the questions of the “Pop Gen Chen Lab,” run by Nancy Chen. The lab addresses questions and utilizes tools to think about contemporary questions in short-term evolution, and how genetic variation is maintained in contemporary populations. In addition, the Chen lab makes use of the Florida Scrub Jay (a very compelling and well-studied system) to study population decline. The Chen lab has also generated an extremely useful list of resources on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and continues to be a leading voice on these matters in the population genetics community. 

Lorin Crawford

Though he was raised in southern California, Lorin Crawford will come to PEQG from balmy New England, where his research program is sprawled out between Microsoft Research in Boston and Brown University (in Providence) where he is the RGSS Assistant Professor. It is difficult to fully capture the richness of his research program. He utilizes advanced statistical and machine learning approaches to directly address provocative questions in population genetics. For example, he has pioneered statistical tests that can be used to detect pairwise epistasis between mutations in large genomic data sets. In addition, his work dissects the architecture of complex traits. Lastly, Crawford has recently begun to explore the ethics of genomics evolution. Recent work in this realm has challenged notions that are used to characterize populations, such as “transethnic.”

Rafael Guerrero

From North Carolina comes Rafael Guerrero, an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. He runs a program that develops tools that have already transformed our approach to classical questions in population and evolutionary genetics and explores the questions directly relevant to practical problems in biomedicine and bioengineering. In the former sense, Guerrero has done groundbreaking work on chromosome evolution and hybrid incompatibilities in light of speciation genetics, both central and critical questions in evolutionary genetics. In the latter sense, Guerrero’s mastery of theoretical tools has allowed him to explore areas such as the genomics of adverse pregnancy outcomes, and the physiological determinants of epistatic interactions as they manifest in the evolution of antibiotic resistance.

Priya Moorjani

The Genetics Society of America is well-known for its commitment to model systems research and has long championed its importance. But it also recognizes the importance of human genetics and evolutionary biology, not only because we…are humans, but also because human evolution is an amazing problem space for cutting-edge questions in evolutionary and population genetics. Few scientists are doing more exciting work in this area than Priya Moorjani. Moorjani uses statistical and computational approaches to understand the role of genetic variation in human evolution, demography, and mapping disease risk alleles at the University of California, Berkeley. Moorjani has also investigated fundamental questions in primate evolution, such as the proper estimation of mutation rates. Moorjani has mastered the art of transforming a species that we all care about–Homo sapiens–into a model system in evolutionary genetics. 

Rori Rohlfs

As Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University, Rori Rohlfs won’t need to travel especially far to get to Asilomar, but everything with Rori is an intellectual expedition. Rohlfs runs an exciting program that has examined everything from the evolution of gene regulation to critical statistical questions relevant to genomic testing and forensics. Rohlfs has accomplished this while also being a widely recognized teacher and mentor. Lastly, Rohlfs was one of the corresponding authors on an outstanding 2019 study published in GENETICS that analyzed early population genetics literature and identified the many women that were often denied proper credit for their participation.

Daniel Runcie

When I teach evolution, I often discuss a 2018 study that estimated the biomass of living things on earth, organized by different taxa. Though I do not study plants, I often use it to explain that when it comes to life on earth, plant life is the heavyweight champion. Daniel Runcie runs a thrilling research program that attempts to understand how and why plants are so successful, and especially questions related to genetic variation and phenotypic plasticity. The Runcie lab attempts to identify pathways and networks related to how plants respond to a dynamic environment. One of the reasons that plants have been so successful is their ability to respond to change. The Runcie lab uses a host of tools—statistical, network, and ecophysiological—to understand these questions.

Learn more about the #PEQG22 Session Chairs, as well as Invited Speakers, on the conference website. Registration is open now.

About the author

C. Brandon Ogbunu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and one of the organizers of the 2022 Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference.