We had two papers published in PLoS Biology this week, one led by Simon Martin and the other by Richard Merrill. Both represent many years of work! We also wrote a blog post about them and they were featured on the university website The work was funded by the ERC. The papers generated quite a […]

We published a paper over a year ago on BioRxiv that narrows down the Yb locus, controlling yellow patches on Heliconius wings, to a region around the Cortex gene. The paper just came out in Nature this morning, with lots of news coverage (from Daily Mirror to Washington Post), mainly because of the very cool […]

Cambridge TV ran a feature on the news last night about natural selection and genetic diversity and Simon’s paper in Genetics. It is available here – scroll ahead to 4:47 if you don’t want to hear about the severed head in Mepal!

Simon Martin has just published a study in which we searched for signals of natural selection in the genomes of nearly 70 whole genome sequences sampled from H. melpomene and other species. Signals of selection were weaker than seen in fruit flies, but much stronger than in humans. Interestingly the amount of standing variation is […]