Alex submitted her M.Sc. thesis and presented her study to the department today in her public defence. This is the end of a very large and ambitious project that Alex contributed to a lot and tied together extremely well! It’s a collaboration with the labs of Jessica Purcell and Alan Brelsford (UC Riverside), as well as colleagues from the GAGA Consortium that contributed samples and built the reference genomes for the species we analyzed.

In this project we investigated the evolution of genomes and of recombination rates using 8 representitive species from the large ant subfamily Formicinae. We conducted RAD sequencing and built a linkage map for each species, and then calculated the recombination rates and anlyzed their variation across the genome and between species. We found large variation among species, but all formicine ants have high recombination relative to other animals. Our favourite species, the desert ant Cataglyphis niger, actually has as high recombination rate as the honeybee Apis mellifera, which holds the record!