The editorial board is seeking nominations for the Harry Smith Prize, which recognizes the best paper published in Molecular Ecology or Molecular Ecology Resources in the previous year by graduate students or early career scholars with no more than five years of postdoctoral or fellowship experience. The prize comes with a cash award of US$1000 and an announcement in the journal and in the Molecular Ecologist. The winner will also be asked to join a junior editorial board for the journal to offer advice on changing research needs and potentially serve as a guest editor. The winner of this annual prize is selected by the junior editorial board.
The prize is named after Professor Harry Smith FRS, who founded Molecular Ecology and served as both Chief and Managing Editor during the journal’s critical early years. He continued as the journal’s Managing Editor until 2008, and he went out of his way to encourage early career scholars. In addition to his editorial work, Harry was one of the world’s foremost researchers in photomorphogenesis, where he determined how plants respond to shading, leading to concepts such as “neighbour detection” and “shade avoidance,” which are fundamental to understanding plant responses to crowding and competition. More broadly his research provided an early example of how molecular data could inform ecology, and in 2008 he was awarded the Molecular Ecology Prize that recognized both his scientific and editorial contributions to the field.
Please send a PDF of the paper you are nominating, with a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) directly to Dr. Kaichi Huang (kaichi.huang@botany.ubc.ca) and Dr. Arne Jacobs (arne.jacobs@glasgow.ac.uk) by Friday 31 March 2023. Self-nominations are encouraged.
We are soliciting nominations for the annual Molecular Ecology Prize.
The field of molecular ecology is young and inherently interdisciplinary. As a consequence, research in molecular ecology is not currently represented by a single scientific society, so there is no body that actively promotes the discipline or recognizes its pioneers. The editorial board of the journal Molecular Ecology therefore created the Molecular Ecology Prize in order to fill this void, and recognize significant contributions to this area of research. The prize selection committee is independent of the journal and its editorial board.
The prize will go to an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to molecular ecology. These contributions would mostly be scientific, but the door is open for other kinds of contributions that were crucial to the development of the field. The previous winners are: Godfrey Hewitt, John Avise, Pierre Taberlet, Harry Smith, Terry Burke, Josephine Pemberton, Deborah Charlesworth, Craig Moritz, Laurent Excoffier, Johanna Schmitt, Fred Allendorf, Louis Bernatchez, Nancy Moran, Robin Waples, Scott Edwards, Victoria Sork, Fuwen Wei, and Kerstin Johannesson.
Please send your nomination with a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) and the candidate’s CV directly to Joanna Freeland (joannafreeland@trentu.ca) by Friday, March 31, 2023. Organized campaigns to submit multiple nominations for the same person are not necessary and can be counterproductive. Also, note that nominations from previous years do not roll over.
With thanks on behalf of the Molecular Ecology Prize Selection Committee.
We are soliciting nominations for the annual Molecular Ecology Prize.
The field of molecular ecology is young and inherently interdisciplinary. As a consequence, research in molecular ecology is not currently represented by a single scientific society, so there is no body that actively promotes the discipline or recognizes its pioneers. The editorial board of the journal Molecular Ecology therefore created the Molecular Ecology Prize in order to fill this void, and recognize significant contributions to this area of research. The prize selection committee is independent of the journal and its editorial board.
The prize will go to an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to molecular ecology. These contributions would mostly be scientific, but the door is open for other kinds of contributions that were crucial to the development of the field. The previous winners are: Godfrey Hewitt, John Avise, Pierre Taberlet, Harry Smith, Terry Burke, Josephine Pemberton, Deborah Charlesworth, Craig Moritz, Laurent Excoffier, Johanna Schmitt, Fred Allendorf, Louis Bernatchez, Nancy Moran, Robin Waples, Scott Edwards, Victoria Sork, and Fuwen Wei.
Please send your nomination with a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) and the candidate’s CV directly to Anne Yoder (anne.yoder@duke.edu) by Monday, June 6, 2022. Organized campaigns to submit multiple nominations for the same person are not necessary and can be counterproductive. Also, note that nominations from previous years do not roll over.
With thanks on behalf of the Molecular Ecology Prize Selection Committee
The editorial board recently established a prize that recognizes the best paper published in Molecular Ecology or Molecular Ecology Resources in the last year by graduate students or early career scholars with no more than five years of postdoctoral or fellowship experience. The prize is named after Professor Harry Smith FRS, who founded Molecular Ecology and served as both Chief and Managing Editor during the journal’s critical early years. He continued as the journal’s Managing Editor until 2008, and he went out of his way to encourage early career scholars. In addition to his editorial work, Harry was one of the world’s foremost researchers in photomorphogenesis, leading to concepts such as “neighbour detection” and “shade avoidance,” which are essential to understanding plant responses to crowding and competition. His research provided an early example of how molecular data could inform ecology, and in 2008 he was awarded the Molecular Ecology Prize that recognized both his scientific and editorial contributions to the field. As with the Molecular Ecology Prize, the winner of this annual prize is selected by an independent award committee, but the Harry Smith Prize comes with a 1,000 USD cash award, an announcement in the journal and on social media, as well as an invitation to join the Molecular Ecology Junior Editorial Board. Please send a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) and PDF of the paper you are nominating to Dr. Alison Gonçalves Nazareno (alison_nazareno@yahoo.com.br) or Dr. Kaichi Huang (kaichi.huang@botany.ubc.ca) by Friday 29 April 2022. Self-nominations are also encouraged. Nominated papers must have been published in Molecular Ecology or Molecular Ecology Resources in 2021.
Telomeres function like the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces. They cap the end of chromosomes and protect the coding DNA by shortening during every cell division. When they reach a critically short length, the cell stops dividing and dies. Telomeres are often used as a marker of ageing and different environmental conditions in ecology and evolution. Blood is commonly used to measure telomeres but is not always representative of all tissues and can be difficult to obtain from smaller animals, such as bats. We measured telomere length across different tissues in the Egyptian fruit bat to see if wing tissue biopsies, a quick and relatively non-invasive method of collecting tissue for bat DNA studies, could be used for measuring telomere length in bats. We found that wing telomeres correlated with most tissues. Wing telomere length measured from multiple samples taken from the same individual were highly repeatable. Even with training, taking blood from bats can be extremely difficult, while wing tissue biopsies with the required training are a faster and more straightforward method. Our findings provide robust support for the use of wing tissue in bat telomere studies as an alternate to otherwise harder to obtain tissues.
This summary was written by lead author Megan Power. Read the paper here.
We are soliciting nominations for the annual Molecular Ecology Prize.
The field of molecular ecology is young and inherently interdisciplinary. As a consequence, research in molecular ecology is not currently represented by a single scientific society, so there is no body that actively promotes the discipline or recognizes its pioneers. The editorial board of the journal Molecular Ecology therefore created the Molecular Ecology Prize in order to fill this void, and recognize significant contributions to this area of research. The prize selection committee is independent of the journal and its editorial board.
The prize will go to an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to molecular ecology. These contributions would mostly be scientific, but the door is open for other kinds of contributions that were crucial to the development of the field. The previous winners are: Godfrey Hewitt, John Avise, Pierre Taberlet, Harry Smith, Terry Burke, Josephine Pemberton, Deborah Charlesworth, Craig Moritz, Laurent Excoffier, Johanna Schmitt, Fred Allendorf, Louis Bernatchez, Nancy Moran, Robin Waples, Scott Edwards, and Victoria Sork.
Please send your nomination with a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) and the candidate’s CV directly to Scott Edwards (sedwards@fas.harvard.edu) by Friday, April 16, 2021. Organized campaigns to submit multiple nominations for the same person are not necessary and can be counterproductive. Also, note that nominations from previous years do not roll over.
The editorial board recently established a new prize that recognizes the best paper published in Molecular Ecology or Molecular Ecology Resources by early career scholars in the last year by graduate students or early career scholars with no more than five years of postdoctoral or fellowship experience. The prize is named after Professor Harry Smith FRS, who founded Molecular Ecology and served as both Chief and Managing Editor during the journal’s critical early years. He continued as the journal’s Managing Editor until 2008, and he went out of his way to encourage early career scholars. In addition to his editorial work, Harry was one of the world’s foremost researchers in photomorphogenesis, leading to concepts such as “neighbour detection” and “shade avoidance,” which are essential to understanding plant responses to crowding and competition. His research provided an early example of how molecular data could inform ecology, and in 2008 he was awarded the Molecular Ecology Prize that recognized both his scientific and editorial contributions to the field. As with the Molecular Ecology Prize, the winner of this annual prize is selected by an independent award committee, but the Harry Smith Prize comes with a 1,000 USD cash award, an announcement in the journal and on social media, as well as an invitation to join the Molecular Ecology Junior Editorial Board. Please send a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) and PDF of the paper you are nominating to Dr. Alison Nazareno (nazareno@umich.edu) or Dr. Katrina West (katrina.m.west@postgrad.curtin.edu.au) by Friday 31 May 2021. Self-nominations are accepted.
Molecular barcoding of bird malaria and related parasites has unravelled a remarkable diversity of potentially cryptic species that may count in tens of thousands compared to the few hundred morphologically described species. The database MalAvi (Bensch et al., 2009) was initiated to structure the growing numbers of findings of these bird blood parasites. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is irrefutably a powerful method to detect and identify pathogens, however the high sensitivity of the method comes with a cost; any of the millions of artificial DNA copies generated by PCR can serve as a template in a following experiment. If such PCR-contaminations go undetected, it will result in erroneous findings of parasites and thus misrepresent their distribution. We address this problem by re-analysing samples of surprising records in the MalAvi database, these being unusual host species or geographic locations for the parasites. Our analyses suggest that many of these are PCR contaminations, presumably originating from previous or parallel projects in the laboratory. The highlighted examples are from bird parasites, but the problem of contaminations, and the suggested actions to reduce such errors, should apply generally to all kinds of studies using PCR for identification.
Fig 1. The database MalAvi (http://130.235.244.92/Malavi/) presently contains >4,400 unique mitochondrial lineages of avian malaria parasites obtained from >2,000 species of birds.
References Bensch, S., Hellgren, O. & Pérez-Tris, J. MalAvi: 2009. A public database of malaria parasites and related haemosporidians in avian hosts based on mitochondrial cytochrome b lineages. Molecular Ecology Resources, 9: 1353-1358.
Molecular Ecology and Molecular Ecology Resources are looking for new Editorial Board members to join the journals as Associate Editors in the key subject areas below:
Experience with genome assemblies would also be advantageous.
Nominations and applications are welcome and whilst scientific qualifications are paramount, we would particularly appreciate nominations and applications from suitably qualified researchers from underrepresented groups (including women, ethnic minority scientists, scientists with disabilities and other underrepresented groups). Please email nominations/applications by October 15th, 2020 to manager.molecol@wiley.com with the following items:
Cover letter stating the reasons for your nomination, of if applying for yourself, your interest in the role and familiarity with the journals,
Abbreviated CV (Education, Publications, Outreach) if you have it.
In this interview, Professor Bo Dong tells us about his team’s recent study exploring the genomic basis of environmental adaptation in the leathery sea squirt (Styela clava), a highly invasive species of tunicate that has adapted to a broad range of environments. In this study, the authors assembled a chromosomal-level genome and transcriptome of the leathery sea squirt and undertook in situ hybridization and drug inhibition experiments in order to elucidate molecular mechanisms of adaptation. Continue reading to find out what the team found and why it matters, and click here to read the article.
Styela clava, the leathery sea squirt. Photograph by Xiang Li, an author of the study
What led to your interest in this topic / what was the motivation for this study?
Our lab works on organ morphogenesis and developmental genomics using an ascidian model. When we collected animals at the sea in Qingdao, China, we found many leathery sea squirts. Previous research has found that the leathery sea squirt is invasive across the globe, and impacts on both marine biodiversity and aquaculture industries. Therefore, we were interested in revealing the genomic basis of its adaptation. In addition, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, in celebration of its 25th anniversary, created a poll of species where the winners would have their genomes decoded. The leathery sea squirt was included in the ‘Dangerous Zone’ category of the poll, and although it did not win this strengthened our determination to decode its genome.
The leathery sea squirt was an option in the vote for the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s ’25 Genomes for 25 Years’.
What difficulties did you run into along the way?
In order to obtain a better genome assembly, we used the PacBio sequencing and combined this with Hi-C approach. Because of the small size of leathery sea squirt adults, we tried many times to get enough high-quality DNA from one individual for library construction. In addition, the approaches for functional analysis is fairly limited in this ascidian species. We tried different ways to do dechorionation or microinject the DNA into the eggs, but it was not working well. We are continuing our work on this now.
What is the biggest or most surprising finding from this study?
Compared with the classical ascidian model species Ciona robusta, we found that Styela clava has a genome double the size but with comparable gene number. Another intriguing finding is that cold-shock protein genes were transferred horizontally into the S. clava genome from bacteria. Transfer of these genes provides one of the possible molecular mechanisms for S. clava to adapt the environmental stress, particularly low-temperature stress.
Moving forward, what are the next steps for this research?
We obtained the genetic information and molecular network of environmental adaptation and metamorphosis of leathery sea squirts through high quality genome assembly. Next, we are focusing on two further aspects of this project: 1) we are further digging into the signaling molecules that control the larval metamorphosis experimentally and 2) we plan to reveal the mechanisms for gene transfer from bacteria to ascidians.
What would your message be for students about to start their first research projects in this topic?
First, you should know clearly what kinds of scientific questions you want to ask by genome assembly approaches. Second, try to discuss your research projects with scientists with different backgrounds to adjust your research strategies and analyze your results. Third, compare your genome data with the data from other species to see if your conclusion is a universal one.
What have you learned about science over the course of this project?
Animals are so smart. They use different and unexpected strategies to adapt to environmental stress. Genomic approaches are a powerful way to elucidate the biological mechanisms of adaptation. Experimental results are often different from your expectations.
Describe the significance of this research for the general scientific community in one sentence.
The present study provides a chromosomal-level genome for understanding environmental adaptation in invasive tunicates.
Describe the significance of this research for your scientific community in one sentence.
Our study provides the chromosomal-level genome resources of leathery sea squirt (S. clava) and a comprehensive genomic basis for understanding environmental adaptation and larval metamorphosis.
Citation:
Wei, Jiankai, et al. “Genomic basis of environmental adaptation in the leathery sea squirt (Styela clava).” Molecular Ecology Resources (2020). doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.13209
Molecular Ecology Spotlight 