Generating and testing the efficacy of reagents for CRISPR/Cas9 homology directed repair-based manipulations in Tribolium.

CRISPR/Cas9 manipulations are possible in many insects and ever expanding. Nonetheless, success in one species and techniques developed for it are not necessarily applicable to other species. As such, the development and expansion of CRISPR-based (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) genome-editing tools and methodologies are dependent upon direct experimentation.

Niche construction and the environmental term of the price equation: How natural selection changes when organisms alter their environments.

Organisms construct their own environments and phenotypes through the adaptive processes of habitat choice, habitat construction, and phenotypic plasticity. We examine how these processes affect the dynamics of mean fitness change through the environmental change term of the Price Equation. This tends to be ignored in evolutionary theory, owing to the emphasis on the first term describing the effect of natural selection on mean fitness (the additive genetic variance for fitness of Fisher's Fundamental Theorem).

Relative rates of evolution of male-beneficial nuclear compensatory mutations and male-harming Mother's Curse mitochondrial alleles.

Mother's Curse alleles represent a significant source of potential male fitness defects. The maternal inheritance of mutations with the pattern of sex-specific fitness effects, s♀>0>s♂, allows Mother's Curse alleles to spread through a population even though they reduce male fitness. Although the mitochondrial genomes of animals contain only a handful of protein-coding genes, mutations in many of these genes have been shown to have a direct effect on male fertility.

Host-parasite coevolution: Partitioning the effects of natural selection and environmental change using coupled Price equations.

George Price showed how the effects of natural selection and environmental change could be mathematically partitioned. This partitioning may be especially useful for understanding host-parasite coevolution, where each species represents the environment for the other species. Here, we use coupled Price equations to study this kind of antagonistic coevolution.

Niche construction in quantitative traits: heritability and response to selection.

A central tenet of niche construction (NC) theory is that organisms can alter their environments in heritable and evolutionarily important ways, often altering selection pressures. We suggest that the physical changes niche constructors make to their environments may also alter trait heritability and the response of phenotypes to selection. This effect might change evolution, over and above the effect of NC acting via selection alone.

Generating and testing the efficacy of transgenic Cas9 in Tribolium castaneum.

CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing has now expanded to many insect species, including Tribolium castaneum. However, compared to Drosophila melanogaster, the CRISPR toolkit of T. castaneum is limited.

Adaptive co-evolution of mitochondria and the Y-chromosome: A resolution to conflict between evolutionary opponents.

In most species with motile sperm, male fertility depends upon genes located on the Y-chromosome and in the mitochondrial genome. Coordinated adaptive evolution for the function of male fertility between genes on the Y and the mitochondrion is hampered by their uniparental inheritance in opposing sexes: The Y-chromosome is inherited uniparentally, father to son, and the mitochondrion is inherited maternally, mother to offspring. Preserving male fertility is problematic, because maternal inheritance permits mitochondrial mutations advantageous to females, but deleterious to male fertility, to accumulate in a population.

Maternal-Offspring Interactions: Reciprocally Coevolving Social Environments.

Maternal-zygotic co-evolution is one of the most common examples of indirect genetic effects. I investigate how maternal-zygotic gene interactions affect rates of evolution and adaptation. Using comparably parameterized population genetic models, I compare evolution to an abiotic environment with genotype-by-environment interaction (G × E) to evolution to a maternal environment with offspring genotype-by-maternal environment interaction (G × Gmaternal).

When is Offspring Viability Fitness a Measure of Paternal Fitness and When is it not?

We use population genetics to model the evolution of a gene with an indirect effect owing to paternal care and with a second pleiotropic, direct effect on offspring viability. We use the model to illustrate how the common empirical practice of considering offspring viability as a component of parent fitness can confound a gene's direct and indirect fitness effects. We investigate when this confounding results in a distorted picture of overall evolution and when it does not.

The evolutionary genetics of paternal care: How good genes and extrapair copulation affect the trade-off between paternal care and mating success.

We investigate the evolution of a gene for paternal care, with pleiotropic effects on male mating fitness and offspring viability, with and without extrapair copulations (EPCs). We develop a population genetic model to examine how pleiotropic effects of a male mating advantage and paternal care are affected by "good genes" and EPCs. Using this approach, we show that the relative effects of each on fitness do not always predict the evolutionary change.

Relaxed Selection and the Rapid Evolution of Reproductive Genes.

Evolutionary genomic studies find that reproductive protein genes, those directly involved in reproductive processes, diversify more rapidly than most other gene categories. Strong postcopulatory sexual selection acting within species is the predominant hypothesis proposed to account for the observed pattern. Recently, relaxed selection due to sex-specific gene expression has also been put forward to explain the relatively rapid diversification.

When mother knows best: A population genetic model of transgenerational versus intragenerational plasticity.

Many organisms exhibit phenotypic plasticity; producing alternate phenotypes depending on the environment. Individuals can be plastic (intragenerational or direct plasticity), wherein individuals of the same genotype produce different phenotypes in response to the environments they experience. Alternatively, an individual's phenotype may be under the control of its parents, usually the mother (transgenerational or indirect plasticity), so that mother's genotype determines the phenotype produced by a given genotype of her offspring.

50-year anniversary of Lloyd's "mean crowding": Ideas on patchy distributions.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Monte B. Lloyd's "Mean Crowding" (1967) paper, in which he introduced a metric that accounts for an individual's experience of conspecific density. Mean crowding allows ecologists to measure the degree of spatial aggregation of individuals in a manner relevant to intraspecific competition for resources.

Response to Comment on "Precipitation drives global variation in natural selection".

The comment by Myers-Smith and Myers focuses on three main points: (i) the lack of a mechanistic explanation for climate-selection relationships, (ii) the appropriateness of the climate data used in our analysis, and (iii) our focus on estimating climate-selection relationships across (rather than within) taxonomic groups. We address these critiques in our response.

The promise and peril of CRISPR gene drives: Genetic variation and inbreeding may impede the propagation of gene drives based on the CRISPR genome editing technology.

Gene drives are selfish genetic elements that use a variety of mechanisms to ensure they are transmitted to subsequent generations at greater than expected frequencies. Synthetic gene drives based on the clustered regularly interspersed palindromic repeats (CRISPR) genome editing system have been proposed as a way to alter the genetic characteristics of natural populations of organisms relevant to the goals of public health, conservation, and agriculture. Here, we review the principles and potential applications of CRISPR drives, as well as means proposed to prevent their uncontrolled spread.

What Are the Environmental Determinants of Phenotypic Selection? A Meta-analysis of Experimental Studies.

Although many selection estimates have been published, the environmental factors that cause selection to vary in space and time have rarely been identified. One way to identify these factors is by experimentally manipulating the environment and measuring selection in each treatment. We compiled and analyzed selection estimates from experimental studies.

CRISPR/Cas9 gene drives in genetically variable and nonrandomly mating wild populations.

Synthetic gene drives based on CRISPR/Cas9 have the potential to control, alter, or suppress populations of crop pests and disease vectors, but it is unclear how they will function in wild populations. Using genetic data from four populations of the flour beetle , we show that most populations harbor genetic variants in Cas9 target sites, some of which would render them immune to drive (ITD). We show that even a rare ITD allele can reduce or eliminate the efficacy of a CRISPR/Cas9-based synthetic gene drive.

Precipitation drives global variation in natural selection.

Climate change has the potential to affect the ecology and evolution of every species on Earth. Although the ecological consequences of climate change are increasingly well documented, the effects of climate on the key evolutionary process driving adaptation-natural selection-are largely unknown. We report that aspects of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration, along with the North Atlantic Oscillation, predicted variation in selection across plant and animal populations throughout many terrestrial biomes, whereas temperature explained little variation.

Nuclear-mitochondrial epistasis: a gene's eye view of genomic conflict.

We use population genetic models to investigate the cooperative and conflicting synergistic fitness effects between genes from the nucleus and the mitochondrion. By varying fitness parameters, we examine the scope for conflict relative to cooperation among genomes and the utility of the "gene's eye view" analytical approach, which is based on the marginal average fitness of specific alleles. Because sexual conflict can maintain polymorphism of mitochondrial haplotypes, we can explore two types of evolutionary conflict (genomic and sexual) with one epistatic model.

The effects of temperature, relative humidity, light, and resource quality on flight initiation in the red flour beetle, .

We investigated the environmental conditions that induce a flight response in the red flour beetle, Herbst (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae), including resource quality, temperature, relative humidity, and light. Over 72-h trial periods, we observed the proportion of individuals emigrating by flight to range from 0.0 in extreme heat or cold to 0.

Evolutionary genetics of maternal effects.

Maternal genetic effects (MGEs), where genes expressed by mothers affect the phenotype of their offspring, are important sources of phenotypic diversity in a myriad of organisms. We use a single-locus model to examine how MGEs contribute patterns of heritable and nonheritable variation and influence evolutionary dynamics in randomly mating and inbreeding populations. We elucidate the influence of MGEs by examining the offspring genotype-phenotype relationship, which determines how MGEs affect evolutionary dynamics in response to selection on offspring phenotypes.

The evolution of sperm competition genes: The effect of mating system on levels of genetic variation within and between species.

It is widely established that proteins involved in reproduction diverge between species more quickly than other proteins. For male sperm proteins, rapid divergence is believed to be caused by postcopulatory sexual selection and/or sexual conflict. Here, we derive the expected levels of gene diversity within populations and divergence between them for male sperm protein genes evolving by postcopulatory, prezygotic fertility competition, i.

Direct and indirect genetic effects in life-history traits of flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum).

Indirect genetic effects (IGEs) are the basis of social interactions among conspecifics, and can affect genetic variation of nonsocial and social traits. We used flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) of two phenotypically distinguishable populations to estimate genetic (co)variances and the effect of IGEs on three life-history traits: development time (DT), growth rate (GR), and pupal body mass (BM). We found that GR was strongly affected by social environment with IGEs accounting for 18% of the heritable variation.

Self-Reported Pain and Pain Management Strategies Among Veterans With Traumatic Brain Injury: A Pilot Study.

Reports of chronic pain such as headache, back and neck pain, and other musculoskeletal conditions are common among veterans with history of traumatic brain injury (TBI). This pilot study investigates self-reported pain and pain management strategies in a sample of veterans in postacute recovery from TBI. Participants included 24 outpatients with history of mild-to-moderate TBI who completed a series of self-report measures by mail, including the Pain Outcomes Questionnaire, the Pain Symptom Survey pain scale, and a detailed background survey.