A male A. distichus favillarum (a.k.a. a male Fav) extending it’s dewlap. This animal was photographed in the contact zone between orange- and yellow-dewlapped Favs.
Color and color-pattern research is a powerhouse in the study of evolution. Don’t believe me? I bet that at least one of your top five examples of evolution includes either color or color pattern. It is also very likely that some of the gene names you know by heart are from either color or color-pattern genes. Here’s an exercise: think which were the ‘textbook’ examples of evolution that you were taught in school. I’m sure that at least one of those included either color or color pattern. Here’s a famous example: Peppered moths. Another one? Deer mice. Another one? Heliconius butterflies. Another one? Coral snakes. What about color genes? Does MC1R ring a bell? Another one? ASIP (a.k.a. agouti)? Another one? Well, I should stop here before DJ Khaled sues me for copyright infringement.
Most of these early studies, however – and specially studies that attempted to unveil the genetic basis of color and color pattern – focused on melanin-based traits. The reason for this bias was simple: human color is melanin-based. This means that when these early studies took place, we knew more about the genetic basis of melanin synthesis than any other pigment by a long shot. As a consequence, melanin-based traits were ideal for candidate gene approaches – like the ones implemented in early color and color-pattern studies. As you and I know, though, the world isn’t black and white (see what I did here?). Color is all around us, and it plays all kinds of amazing roles, such as intra-specific communication (think dewlapping anoles), inter-specific communication (think dewlapping anoles), and crypsis (think non-dewlapping anoles). This means that, until recently, we didn’t have the tools to connect the genetic basis of most colorful traits to their phenotypes, specially in non-model organsisms.
Then, something happened: second generation sequencing came around. Illumina, a key player in second generation sequencing, was founded in 1998, the same year that Brazil lost the World Cup Final to France (many Brazilians, like me, think about time in four-year cycles due to the World Cup… and we don’t talk about 2014). With second generation sequencing, we could finally gather loads of data to do all kinds of glorified regressions (sorry generalized linear mixed models), and run computers for very long times so that we could try every feasible parameter combination (sorry Markov Chains) to identify candidate genes for the trait we are interested in. Connecting genotypes to phenotypes and understanding how both genotypes and phenotypes interact and change due to selection is, in fact, one of my main research interests.
I’m particularly interested in understanding the genetic basis of two phenotypes: those associated with color and color pattern, and those associated with the evolution of reproductive isolation.