Participants from the March 2016 meeting of the Working Group (L to R) Michael Antolin, Joanna Kelly, Andrew Storfer, Katie Lotterhos, Sean Hoban, David Lowry, Laura Reed.
The work of the NIMBioS Working Group on Computational Landscape Genomics has come to fruition with a synthesis review paper in The American Naturalist.
“Finding the genomic basis of local adaptation: Pitfalls, practical solutions, and future directions” provides a critical assessment of complex approaches to identifying genes that underlie adaptive differentiation of populations.
The Working Group, which has met three times since 2014, consists of experts in genomics, statistics, mathematics, bioinformatics and population genetics. Its chief goal has been to advance analytical and computational methods that integrate both the genomic and the ecological landscapes in order to understand the spatial distribution of adaptive genetic variation.
Lead co-authors are former NIMBioS postdoc Sean Hoban, now a tree conservation biologist at the Morton Arboretum; Joanna Kelley, Biological Sciences, Washington State Univ.; and Katie Lotterhos, Marine and Environmental Sciences, Northeastern Univ. Marine Science Center, Nahant, MA. Working Group co-organizers are Andrew Storfer, Biological Sciences, Washington State Univ.; Gilles Guillot, Applied Mathematics, Technical Univ. of Denmark, Copenhagen; Mike Antolin, Biology, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins; and Mary Poss, Biology, Penn State Univ., University Park.
NIMBioS Working Groups are chosen to focus on major well-defined scientific questions at the interface between biology and mathematics that require insights from diverse researchers, meeting up to three times over a two-year period. Working Groups are relatively small with no more than 15 participants, focus on a well-defined topic and have well-defined goals and metrics of success.
The next deadline to request support for a Working Group at NIMBioS is Sept. 1. For more information, visit https://legacy.nimbios.org/workinggroups/