David Marques‘ excellent first dissertation chapter came out in PLoS Genetics this week, and he even got the cover image! David is a Swiss affiliate of the Wagner Lab, as Katie has been a co-supervisor of his PhD at the University of Bern since he started in 2011.

David’s paper uses genomic data to study divergence between lake and stream ecotypes of stickleback in Switzerland, where these fish are relatively recent invaders. A unique aspect of some of the populations he studied is that the lake and stream ecotypes breed in sympatry, and thus there is abundant opportunity for gene flow between them. David used the wealth of data available on the genetic basis of adaptive traits in stickleback to show that consistently differentiated portions of the genome fall in regions with genes known to underlie observed trait differences between the ecotypes.

Excellent work, David!