 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
2006 Summer Program in Ecology and Evolution Each summer the MBI hosts a 3-week education program. The first week is spent in a tutorial, which combines morning lectures with active learning laboratories in the afternoon. The following 2 weeks are spent working on guided team projects and participating in a miniconference to share project results. The program is meant primarily for graduate students; college instructors and qualified undergraduates will also be considered. The 2006 Summer Program dates are July 17 - August 4. Program Leaders: Kate Calder and Yuan Lou Tutorial Week: Monday 7/17 - Friday 7/21 Summer Program Topics:
Friday 8/4
Project 1: Effects of spatial heterogeneity on invasions of
rare species The evolution of disperal has been one of the central topics in recent theoretical studies of population dynamics. The source-sink model assumes that individuals disperse at fixed constant rates, and it predicts that the selection is for slow dispersal. Part of the project will involve studies of this prediction for two or more competing species. The rest of this project will investigate in a logistic model the effects of migration and spatial heterogeneity of the environment on the total population size at equilibrium of a single species, and its applications to ecological invasions in the context of a two-species Lotka-Volterra competition model with migration. Evolution of conditional dispersal will also be addressed. Project 2: Patterns of multiallelic polymorphism maintained
by migration and selection The goal of this project is to investigate the spatial patterns in gene frenquencies due to the joint action of migration and selection. We'll first study the conditions for the maintenance of polymorphism at a single diallelic locus under a wide variety of migration schemes in discrete-space, discrete-time models. The rest of the project is concerned with a continuous-space, continuous-time model which is sometimes biologically more appropriate and generally yields more transparent and explicit results for the evolution of the gene frequencies. Discrete-time, continuous-time models will also be discussed. Project 3: Evolution of ranges of species Why do range boundaries sometimes lie at arbitrary points in the habitat? From an evolutionary perspective, the peripheral populations receive gene flow from the center of the species' range, which is adapted to the conditions at the periphery where the conditions are typically tougher. Peripheral populations are thus trapped by gene flow into acting as demographic sinks, preventing the range from expanding (Mayr 1963). The project will study recent models that describe both the evolution and demography of species distributed in space, and investigate whether the range limits can be determined by a balance between adaptation and gene flow. Project 4: Spatial Modeling of Trends in Species Abundance Data collected from monitoring programs are an essential component of many applied ecological studies. These monitoring programs often have multiple objectives that include both monitoring trends and estimating abundance. In addition, exploring the effects of covariates on population dynamics is often an important component of a statistical analysis of such data. Project 5: Modeling Wild Bird Population Dynamics from Citizen Surveys West Nile virus is an invasive pathogen that spread rapidly through-out the contiguous United States following introduction into New York City in 1999. Although the virus has caused several severe epizootics and results in high mortality rates in lab challenges, little is known regarding its population-level implications for wild birds. Workshop participants will develop a statistical model to explore historical count data for BBS bird species counted at routes in several Mid-Atlantic States. Using a hierarchical Bayesian approach, the primary objective of the statistical analysis is to provide insight into the underlying mechanisms driving the temporal and spatial variation in population size. Specifically, the modeling objectives are: (1) to estimate regional and local trends prior to West Nile virus introduction; (2) to identify effects of West Nile virus on individual species and, (3) to predict missing data and future population sizes. Project 6: Constructing the progression pathway from normal
tissue to carcinoma A new and rapidly evolving area of study in gene regulation in cancer development and progression is de novo DNA methylation. This form of epigenetic modification is particularly useful in mapping the landscape of different tumor types, stages, and aggressiveness because of its heritability and stability. In this study we will develop techniques for determining informative methylation signatures from high-throughput methylation microarrays of solid tumor samples. The signatures will subsequently be used in combination with tumor/patient phenotypic information to develop progression models for the studied tumors. The recently developed heritable clustering algorithms will be used to construct the progression models. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
