International Research Fellowship Program: Combining Population Genetics and Genomics to Study Threatened Populations

Tallmon David A, Arcata CA

Investigators

Abstract

0202707 Tallmon The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve month research fellowship by Dr. David A. Tallmon to work with Dr. Gordon Luikart at Joseph Fourier University's Lab of Alpine Population Biology in Grenoble, France and Dr. Mark Beaumont at Reading University in the UK. Their project involves the evaluation of the power, bias and precision of new methods to detect cryptic population barriers, low levels of current gene flow among populations, and natural selection in threatened populations. The PI and his collaborators will use available shareware programs to generate genetic data from simulated populations with known demographic and evolutionary histories. They will analyze this data with other existing statistical programs to do the evaluation. The results will be published to aid those working on the conservation of natural populations. Dr. Beaumont is a world leader in the application of Bayesian and maximum likelihood approaches to conservation genetics problems. The Laboratory of Alpine Population Biology is internationally known for its pioneering research in the application of molecular techniques to population genetics.