My dream as a biologist is to understand behavioural evolution by addressing more than one of the Tinbergens’s four questions.
Coming soon…
We have seen birds come and go seasonally for centuries. We see some birds only in certain time of the year, and other birds year around. Eurasian blackcaps Sylvia atricapilla exhibit a full suite of variation in migratory behaviour, from long-distance migration to residency, in a population-typical manner. To understand the evolutionary history underlying this behavioural diversity and the responsible change in molecular regulation, I combine population genomics and brain epigenetics.
Genetic variation along the genome is informative of population history and selection. Recombination affects decay of correlated patterns of genetic variation along a chromosome, and its rate is heterogeneously distributed along the genome. Using extensive simulation, I address how recombination affects summary statistics that are often used to investigate selective processes, and how it impacts inference methods of population history.