These homes were built in 1999, originally surrounded by forest. The globe and mail wrote a story about them 8 years later, once the rest of the neighbourhood filled in. vibrantvictoria.ca/forum/index....

I want to highlight the weirdest neighbourhood in Greater Victoria. In Langford, if you take exit #15 you enter a 6-lane road surrounded by a classic mix of strip malls and big box stores. Nestled of all of this, accessible only through a parking lot, is a small street of 16 single family homes.

One interesting pattern did emerge that the amount of inbreeding load (i.e. selfed vs outbred) varies between populations and this is related to Ne. Small populations have already achieved near their max load so selfing doesn’t increase it.

Does the small populations and selfing help purge deleterious alleles? We looked for sites conserved across brown algae, that did vary in our populations to measure genetic load and found that total load did not vary between small and big populations.

We found geographic population structure with fairly strong IBD. Interestingly, selfing was common and about 10% of the adult kelp were selfed in both species. Some populations, particularly those in Puget Sound, had really small Ne and diversity.

Excited to announce our work on kelp genomics is now out at Current Biology. Lead by Postdoc extraordinaire Jordan Bemmels, we sequence WGS for 600+ bull and giant kelp across BC and Washington. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kSP93QW8S...

Lastly, do a simulation to show that under similar bottlenecks, most of the time the species goes extinct. I feel like these sims would be highly depend on the distribution of fitness effects and how that interacts with density, but its a bit outside my wheelhouse to judge. 4/

They go on to show that this probably because the species went through an EXTREME bottleneck (Ne = 6). This means that the entire species is fixed for more deleterious alleles, but inbred individuals don't have an extra amount of homozygous ones. 3/

Many papers attempt to measure genetic load based on SNPs (myself included), but this paper goes the extra step of linking that to health status of the seals. They show that the more inbred individuals are not less healthy, contrary to what we might expect 2/

Panmictic wheat releasing its pollen.

"Before running structure, we applied a HWE filter to our SNP set"

Some cute bird time for a stressful day.

Housing in Victoria

I've been exploring how to identify inversions in genome alignments. It's surprising to me how fast inversions break up visual synteny. Here's a simple simulation starting from perfect synteny and adding 5 random inversions