Simultaneous species detection and discovery with environmental DNA metabarcoding: A freshwater mollusk case study.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling is a powerful tool for rapidly characterizing biodiversity patterns for specious, cryptic taxa with incomplete taxonomies. One such group that are also of high conservation concern are North American freshwater gastropods. In particular, springsnails of the genus (Family: Hydrobiidae) are prevalent throughout the western United States where >140 species have been described.

Quantitative trait locus mapping reveals an independent genetic basis for joint divergence in leaf function, life-history, and floral traits between scarlet monkeyflower (Mimulus cardinalis) populations.

Premise: Across taxa, vegetative and floral traits that vary along a fast-slow life-history axis are often correlated with leaf functional traits arrayed along the leaf economics spectrum, suggesting a constrained set of adaptive trait combinations. Such broad-scale convergence may arise from genetic constraints imposed by pleiotropy (or tight linkage) within species, or from natural selection alone. Understanding the genetic basis of trait syndromes and their components is key to distinguishing these alternatives and predicting evolution in novel environments.

Ancient and recent introgression shape the evolutionary history of pollinator adaptation and speciation in a model monkeyflower radiation (Mimulus section Erythranthe).

Inferences about past processes of adaptation and speciation require a gene-scale and genome-wide understanding of the evolutionary history of diverging taxa. In this study, we use genome-wide capture of nuclear gene sequences, plus skimming of organellar sequences, to investigate the phylogenomics of monkeyflowers in Mimulus section Erythranthe (27 accessions from seven species). Taxa within Erythranthe, particularly the parapatric and putatively sister species M.