The Ness lab is recruiting multiple funded graduate positions (M.Sc. or Ph.D.) to explore evolution in the genome. In our lab you’ll have the chance to combine field work, experimental evolution, and molecular biology with genomics to study how the genome influences patterns of biological diversity.

My lab has moved to the University of Toronto Mississauga in the Department of Biology.  I will be growing my lab starting in January 2016. We are going to be investigating how evolution and genomics shape the biological world.

In a recent paper, for the first time we were able to investigate de novo mutations in a chloroplast genome. Chloroplasts, like mitochondria, have their own genomes separate from the nuclear genome. In flowering plants, chloroplast genomes tend to be very similar even between distantly related species.

In a new paper my colleagues and I carried on our work using a mutation accumulation experiment to study the basic properties of mutation. Mutation is an important biological process because it generates genetic diversity.

In this study we set out to ask a very basic but fundamental question: how much genetic diversity is maintained in populations of wild rats?

Along with Andrew Morgan, Nick Colegrave and Peter Keightley I recently published the mutation rate of the model alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

In the last study from my PhD, Spencer Barrett, Mathieu Siol and I provide evidence that, as theory would predict, highly inbreeding populations may suffer from the build-up of bad (or 'deleterious') mutations.