This post is a guest contribution from John Stanton-Geddes, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Minnesota. John currently studies the genetic architecture of legume-rhizobium symbiosis in Medicago truncatula, as part of the same lab group as NiB contributor Jeremy Yoder.
If you’d like to write a guest post for Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, email Jeremy.
Two weeks ago I was fortunate to attend the Evolution Society Conference in Ottawa. I saw many great talks, missed even more great talks and had the opportunity to hobnob with many luminaries of evolutionary biology. One theme that emerged through the meeting was “The genetic basis for [insert trait here]. While this goal of mapping phenotype to genotype has been a primary goal of many evolutionary ecologists since the first QTL mapping studies, it has recently come under strong criticism, notably in a fantastic paper by Matthew Rockman in the journal Evolution last year, but also by Pritchard and Di Rienzo 2010 and in a forthcoming article by Ruth Shaw (full disclosure: Ruth was my PhD advisor) and Mike Travisano. Here’s my take on the current state of Genotype to Phenotype (G-P) research from Evolution 2012, and where I’m excited to see it go.
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! 