Andy Moore (Molecular Fisheries Laboratory Associate) visited UQ today for talks with Jenny. Andy is based at the Bureau of Agricultural and Resources Economics and Sciences in Canberra. He works on a range of topics including quantitative stock assessments, fisheries status reporting, genetics, and recreational fishing surveys. Andy is currently primary investigator on a national social and economic recreational fishing survey and a national survey of the catch of southern Bluefin tuna in Australia, as well as a scientific member on Recfishing Research, the Victorian RAC, the Great Australian Bight Resource Assessment Group.
Left: Andy's seminar on designing research surveys for estimating blue fin tuna recreational catch was well attended at the EcoSciences Precinct. Thanks to Jess Morgan.
The visit by Professor Dan Heath from University of Windsor (Canada) came to an end on 24th April 2018. As well as enjoying the fabulous University of Queensland campus and mild weather, Dan collaborated with Jenny and MFL members on eDNA and transcriptome projects. We look forward to further visits!
All welcome to Dan's seminar this Friday at University of Queensland. Poster gives the details.
Minor Update of v2.1 March 2018
The update corrects an error in the mac version of the software where the output file had only headers (no content) when the Frequency Output file was chosen on the interface.
Please download the latest version.
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.
NeOGen software provides a power analysis framework to predict the numbers of individuals and genetic loci required for precise and accurate estimates of genetic effective population size.
The NeOGen software is available for download from