December 2020

Congratulations to Alumna Sabine Felkel to receive an Award of Excellence by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research for her PhD thesis in the Wallner group "Y-chromosomal evolution in Equids: Deciphering the history of horses using Y-chromosomal NGS data" (Defended in September 2019).

Schwarz, Wierzbicki, Senti and Kofler just published in Mol. Biol. Evol.:
Tirant stealthily invaded natural Drosophila melanogaster populations during the last century.

November 2020

Now out in BMC Biology by Langmüller, Nolte, Galagedara, Poupardin, Dolezal and Schlötterer:
Fitness effects for Ace insecticide resistance mutations are determined by ambient temperature.

Link to press release

Virtual institute dinner: In an effort to alleviate the missing social interactions during the crisis, we held a virtual Zoom dinner with 30 participants. Lots of fun, looking forward to the next one!

October 2020

Two successful PhD defenses:

Congratulations to Kerstin Spitzer (Futschik group) on successfully defending her thesis "Improvement of statistical methods used in population genetics" online.

We also congratulate Gökce Aköz (Nordborg group) on successfully defending her thesis "Rediscovering Aquilegia as a model system while chasing chromosome four" during a virtual exam.

New GBE paper: Mallard, Nolte and Schlötterer:
The evolution of phenotypic plasticity in response to temperature stress.

Molecular Biology: paper by Hsu, Belmouaden, Nolte and Schlötterer:
Parallel gene expression evolution in natural and laboratory evolved populations.

September 2020

Due to the pandemic, our PopGen Vienna seminars will turn into webinars for the upcoming Winter term. Schedule and information available here.

25th DZG Graduate Meeting Evolutionary Biology (28 - 30 September, online): Link to website

New preprint: Pelizzola, Behr, Li, Munk and Futschik:
Multiple haplotype reconstruction from allele frequency data.

GBE paper out by Weilguny, Vlachos, Selvaraju and Kofler:
Reconstructing the invasion route of the P-element in Drosophila melanogaster using extant population samples.

August 2020

Article online by Otte and Schlötterer in Molecular Ecology Resources:
Detecting selected haplotype blocks in Evolve and Resequence experiments.

Congratulations to Christos Vlachos (Kofler group) on the successful (online) defense of his thesis "Towards the optimization of E&R experiments"

Article published by Langmüller and Schlötterer in Molecular Ecology:
Low concordance of short-term and long-term selection responses in experimental Drosophila populations.

New preprint by Borges et al.:
Pervasive selection biases inferences of the species tree.

July 2020

GBE paper now published by Barghi and Schlötterer:
Distinct patterns of selective sweep and polygenic adaptation in evolve and resequence studies.

June 2020

Just out in Nature Reviews Genetics by Barghi, Hermisson and Schlötterer:
Polygenic adaptation: a unifying framework to understand positive selection.

New preprints:
Otte, Nolte, Mallard, Schlötterer:
The adaptive architecture is shaped by population ancestry and not by selection regime.

Schwarz, Wierzbicki, Senti and Kofler:
Tirant stealthily invaded natural Drosophila melanogaster populations during the last century.

May 2020

Congratulations to alumna Claudia Bank on her appointment as professor at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern!

Paper published in Frontiers in Genetics by Mazzucco, Nolte, Vijayan and Schlötterer:
Long-term dynamics among Wolbachia strains during thermal adaptation of their Drosophila melanogaster hosts.

MBE paper now accepted:
Jakšić, Karner, Nolte, Hsu, Barghi, Mallard, Otte, Svečnjak, Senti and Schlötterer:
Neuronal function and dopamine signaling evolve at high temperature in Drosophila.

April 2020

New preprints: Törmä, Burny, Nolte, Senti and Schlötterer:
Transcription-coupled repair in Drosophila melanogaster is independent of the mismatch repair pathway.

Törmä, Burny and Schlötterer:
Reversed sex-biased mutation rates for indels and base substitutions in Drosophila melanogaster.

March 2020

GBE papers accepted:

Kofler:
piRNA clusters need a minimum threshold size to control transposable element invasions.

Burny, Nolte, Nouhaud, Dolezal and Schlötterer:
Secondary evolve and re-sequencing: an experimental confirmation of putative selection targets without phenotyping.

New preprint: Wierzbicki, Schwarz, Cannalonga and Kofler:
Generating high quality assemblies for genomic analysis of transposable elements.

February 2020

eLife paper out by Hsu, Jakšić, Nolte, Lirakis, Kofler, Barghi, Versace and Schlötterer: Rapid sex-specific adaptation to high temperature in Drosophila.
Link to press release

Congratulations to three alumni on their career advances: 

Ana Marija Jakšić (currently at Cornell Univ.) accepted a group leader position at the EPFL in Lausanne to work on experimental evolution of the cognitive brain in flies. 

PopGen Vienna alumnus Christian Huber (currently ARC DECRA fellow at the University of Adelaide) accepted a faculty position at Penn State. 

Alumna Polina Novikova (currently Postdoc at Ghent Univ.) will open her lab at MPIPZ in cologne in September.

Papers out:
Borges and Kosiol in J. Theor. Biol.:
Consistency and identifiability of the polymorphism-aware phylogenetic models.

Spitzer, Pelizzola and Futschik in Annals of Applied Statistics:
Modifying the Chi-square and the CMH test for population genetic inference: adapting to over-dispersion.

January 2020

To conclude the old and welcome the new year, 34 members of the institute and the Vienna Graduate School of Population Genetics had a fun and creative night out - we painted mugs for each other and enjoyed dinner together.