Move over, Neolithic ancestors: Designer domesticates are here
Somewhere between reading Jared Diamond, joining a lab that studies the evolution of rice, and adding quinoa to my palate, I’ve come to have a very domestication-centric view of the world. Domestication refers to a process through which new populations, species, or subspecies of crops and animals arise from wild progenitors due to conscious or…
Returning to the bench
It’s been a few months since I last wrote here. I joined Michael Purugganan’s lab and spent the summer trying to infer the demographic history of rice in the context of the peopling of Island Southeast Asia via the Austronesian expansion. The Austronesian expansion represents one of the largest pre-historic migrations we know of, and…
On the Trail of Evolutionary Origin Stories
It’s been a month since my end-of-first-year qualifying exam, and I’ve been meaning to write something about it. For the “quals” in my program (NYU Biology), each student picks two topics or areas of research, from which one is selected by the department. Based on the selected area of research, a committee of three professors…
The Genome Inquirer 