Week 6: My project and why it is interesting!

The 5 PhD students that started along side me. From top left,
Arseny Dubin, Kyle Rogers, Maeve Mcgovern, Peter Schulze,
Solveig Sorensen and me!.  

Greetings once again from my PhD journey, this week was not very exciting and consisted of a lot of reading and learning how to use the command-line on my computer. So in this week’s blog post will be dedicated to letting you all know what exactly the idea is behind my PhD. I will also decorate the post with pictures from my week and I will try to keep it clear and understandable for everyone. So please sit back, relax and enjoy the presentation!

We have always wanted to know the mechanisms behind speciation (the formation of species), but there are so many different factors that leads one species to become two species. It is also becoming more complex and the reason for this is that we have started look at speciation as a continuum (something that goes through a gradual change). One thing that we do know for sure and that is the process of local adaptations where populations evolve to better fit local conditions. When a species evolves there are changes in its DNA, but they usually accumulate in specific parts of the DNA sequence.

The northern lights dancing around the moon this week.

In my research, I will be looking at reproductive barriers, reproductive barriers stop species reproducing and when this happens is key to establishing when a species becomes a species. Reproductive barriers can be a result of many different factors and can be either before an embryo is form or after.  One other key aspect of my research is hybrid zones and the formation of hybrids thought he process of hybridization. When reproductive barriers form between hybridizing species it is very interesting and complex due to the nature of hybridization. Hybridization allows genetic information to be move and shared between the two species, known as “intergression”. Due to intergression, this makes hybrid zones the perfect natural experiment to study the forces that select specific genes which lead to reproductive isolation and ultimately speciation.

Autumn is here and someone is happy about it!

The species I will study, if you had not guessed it already, is the macroalgal (sea weed) Fucus, in particular, Fucus serratus and Fucus distichus. These species provide me the ideal system in which to study the mechanisms of speciation. It has been shown that these two species can produce hybrids in the wild, the sperm from F. serratus can fertilise the eggs of F. disichus. The next important factor about these species is that there are a few hybrid zones, some that have existed for 100 years and one that has existed for around 10,000 years. The reason that this is important is because the older hybrid zone does not produce hybrids whereas the younger hybrid zones do. The reason for this is that hybrids have been shown to be less efficient than either parental species and so natural selection has over time selected individuals that do not produce hybrids or produces less and this process is known as reinforcement. The genes behind this effect are unknown and this is where my research comes in.

My first fish here in Norway!

The central aim of my project is to understand how reproductive isolation mechanisms evolve in the Fucus speciation continuum, from a local adaptation to complete reproductive isolation. And that ladies and gentlemen is the idea behind my PhD.  I hope that you all were able to follow the post to this point and if you had any questions please feel free to ask, I would be very happy to answer them.  But until next time, have a great week everyone!