As pointed out by Scott Gilbert, the environment is a “normal agent of development”. But how do organisms evolve to integrate features of the environment into their development? And how does that affect their ability to evolve further? These are some of the questions that Alfredo will address in his research, which is a close collaboration with computer scientist Richard Watson at the University of Southampton. We are very excited to have Alfredo here on what promises to be an outstanding project!

Alfredo brings strong opinions about coffee and much more to the group. Except for the coffee we think he’ll be fine. Just consider that he is from Rome, the epicentre of green-and-black wall lizards, and did his PhD at the University of Birmingham with John Colbourne, one of the founders of the Daphnia Genomics Consortium. Not to mention that he began his science career as an Msc student with Tobias at Oxford, unravelling what makes some frogs such good invaders. Welcome, Alfredo!

A new study by Nathalie Feiner brings a fresh perspective on the famous adaptive radiation of Anolis lizards. The paper, published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, reveals that speciation events are accompanied by accumulation of DNA sequences that can copy and paste themselves within the genome. Such transposable elements (TEs), popularly referred to as jumping genes, have long been suspected to contribute to evolutionary diversification. Good evidence for this intriguing idea has been hard to come by, however.

There are two main hypothesis for how TEs can contribute to adaptive radiation. Firstly, TE activity may promote speciation by causing genomic incompatibility between incipient species. Secondly, TEs may facilitate adaptation by rewiring gene regulatory networks such that new variants become available for selection.

To test these hypotheses, Nathalie compared the DNA sequences of Hox gene clusters of thirty lizard species. The results revealed that there was a burst of TE activity in the lineage leading to extant Anolis. It did not stop there – TEs have continued to accumulate during speciation events, leading to the pattern that Anolis lizards whose evolutionary history is characterized by many speciation events also accumulated many TEs. This finding nicely supports the hypothesis that TE proliferation may contribute to reproductive isolation.

Could TE activity also have caused the morphological differences that characterize Anolis ecotypes? Well, there is no evidence for this as yet, but this hypothesis is much more difficult to test since we need to learn more about developmental genetics to know where to look. Nevertheless, Nathalie’s study is an exciting first step towards unravelling the genomics of adaptive radiation of these wonderful lizards!

Last month Antonio participated in the Loci of Evolution meta-analysis workshop. The aim of the workshop was to brainstorm ideas for the use and improvement of Gephebase (www.gephebase.org) – a database created by Arnaud Martin (George Washington University) and Virginie Orgogozo (Institut Jacques Monod). Gephebase is a compilation of published studies that have illuminated genotype-to-phenotype relationships in diverse organisms in laboratory and natural settings. The workshop brought evolutionary geneticists from Europe and North America together to discuss technical details about the database as well as ideas for meta-analyses. Antonio’s proposed contribution to this ambitious initiative is to explore patterns of gene network properties underlying genotype-phenotype relationships listed in the database.

The World Congress of Herpetology (WCH) is held every four years, and this time it was planned to take place in Hangzhou, China, from August 15-20, 2016. However, unforeseen circumstances related to the G20 summit held in Hangzhou just 2 weeks later forced the organising committee to change plans and move the venue to the small city of Tonglu, 100 km south of Hangzhou. Within only two days on hand, the local organizers nevertheless managed to transfer all 650 participants to Tonglu and arrange a new venue, a truly impressive achievement!

After this slightly bumpy start, the congress was held as scheduled and the participants could get back to science. As expected for a taxonomic meeting, the topics ranged far and afield – from conservation biology to biogeography, systematics, evolution, genomics and ethnoherpetology. The WCH traditionally does not feature much research on developmental biology, despite the fact that amphibians and reptiles have figured very prominently in comparative embryology and developmental mechanics during the first half of the 20th century. Therefore, Tobias and Nathalie decided to organise a symposium entitled ‘Ontogeny Creates Phylogeny – How Can a Developmental Approach Contribute to Herpetology?’.

The symposium was held in the ‘Grand Imperial Ball Room’, the main hall of the venue. Despite that participants could choose from six parallel sessions, our symposium drew a large crowd. The speakers of the symposium had the opportunity (or challenge) to present their research to a broad audience that is not specialized in developmental biology. Amongst a great line-up of speakers, including Prof. Jim Hanken and Prof. Mike Richardson, Nathalie presented our developmental genetics work showing how wall lizards have adapted to low incubation temperatures in England.

One of the most popular symposia was the one on hybrid zones organised by Ben Wielstra & Evan McCartney‐Melstad. Here, Yang gave the audience a flavour of the genomics of the sexually selected introgression between French and Italian wall lizards. This symposium nicely demonstrated that genomic analyses of hybridization have become a hugely prolific research area. High numbers of samples can be sequenced, which allows a detailed reconstruction of historical processes and testing hypothesis about what drives genetic exchange.

All in all, the WCH was scientifically and culturally (for Nathalie, not so much for Yang) a very interesting experience and a nice way of getting to know the herp communities around the world. Maybe the Uller group will have even more to deliver at the next WCH held in New Zealand in 2020!

Our new paper in Molecular Ecology makes use of 21 introductions of wall lizards into England to show how founder history affects the loss of genetic diversity. We also show that early embryonic mortality is very high in non-native populations compared to native ones.

This looks very much like inbreeding depression, but not all populations or individuals that are inbred do poorly. So there’s different interesting things going on and it could be an interesting system to study in more genomic detail.