Congratulations to Ms Carolina Vargas-Caro for the successful completion of her PhD at the University of Queensland. Carolina was co-supervised by Mike Bennett of the Shark and Ray lab and Jenny Ovenden of the Molecular Fisheries Laboratory.
Photo: Carolina and Peter Last at CSIRO Fish Collection in April 2014 measuring skate specimens.
Congratulations to Di Barton for leading this huge collaborative study on Grass Emperor genetics, otoliths and parasites.
Download the paper here.
Front (L to R) Laura Taillebois, Safia Maher, Dave Welch, Di Barton, Christine Dudgeon, Jenny Ovenden
Back Richard Saunders, Dave Crook, Thor Saunders, Steve Newman and Jonathan Taylor
NeEstimator V2 is a tool for estimating contemporary effective population size (Ne) using multi-locus diploid genotypes from population samples. By ‘contemporary’ we mean that the estimates apply to the time period(s) encompassed by the samples (ie. individuals sampled and genotyped).
Version 2.1 is a major update on V2.01. The changes largely enhance the linkage disequilibrium (LD) capacity of the software for the estimation of genetic effective population size. Enhancements include faster estimation of Burrows r, option to estimate r between loci on different chromosomes or linkage groups (user needs to upload linkage information), improved method of estimating jackknifed confidence intervals and improvements to handling low frequency alleles.
Download the new version here.
PhD student Sam Williams from Project Black Marlin has published another paper from his PhD work. Sam uses the whole mitochondrial DNA genome sequence to test ideas about evolution of the black marlin genus Istiompax. Download the paper here.
Juliana arrived today for a six month internship with MFL at UQ. Juliana is an oceanographer and Ph.D. student in the Fishery Genetics and Conservation research group of led by Dr. Fernando Mendonça at Universidade Federal Paulista (Brazil). Juliana's work focusses on the global phylogeography of the Blue shark (Prionace glauca) based on molecular evidence (SNPs and the mitochondrial DNA control region).
Left to right: Juliana B. De Biasi, Amelia Armstrong, Dani Davenport and Christine Dudgeon.
Nice way to start the day! ResearchGate.net reports that our paper citing the popular downloadable software NeEstimator has been cited 300 times.
Watch out of a new version of NeEstimator soon, which will be enabled for SNP data analyses and other improvements such as the implementation of a new method for estimating confidence intervals.
Jones A. T., Ovenden J. R., Wang Y.-G. (2016) Improved confidence intervals for the linkage disequilibrium method for estimating effective population size. Heredity 117, 217-223.
Christine Dudgeon (right), Jenny Ovenden (centre) are pleased to host a visit by Dr Gregory Maes (KU Leuven - JCU). Greg gave an interesting seminar yesterday "Application of genomic tools to inform conservation and management of the Galapagos shark (Carcharhinus galapagensis)", which stimulated lots of discussion about genomics and genetics of elasmobranch species from Australia and worldwide.
Greg Maes did his postgraduate training at the University of Leuven (Belgium) on population and conservation genetics of aquatic organisms, focusing on exploited and endangered species such as eels, flatfishes, pikes, hybridogenetic frogs and polyploid invasive carps. He spent 6 years doing various postdocs in Belgium, Finland and Canada, examining the applications of population⁄conservation genomics approaches to exploited freshwater and marine fishes at various spatio-temporal scales. His main interest lies in multidisciplinary connectivity assessments, molecular traceability and the genomic basis of fisheries induced evolution in exploited species. He is currently an Adjunct senior lecturer in Evolutionary and Applied Genomics at James Cook University.
PhD student Sam Williams has published an important new 
