Austin Daigle

Demographic History, Genetic Load, and the Efficacy of Selection in the Globally Invasive Mosquito Aedes aegypti Abstract. Aedes aegypti is the main vector species of yellow fever, dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. The species is originally from Africa but has experience

New research by
@tylervkent.bsky.social @samurscicop.bsky.social & D. Matute analysed 131 genomes of the globally invasive Aedes aegypti, and found high genomic resilience despite historical eradication attempts for this globally invasive vector.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

#genome #mosquitoes

Manual validation finds only ultra-long long-read sequencing enables faithful, population-level structural variant calling in Drosophila melanogaster euchromatin The increasing accessibility of long-read sequencing and the rapid development of automated variant callers are promoting the generation of population-level structural variation data. However, the eff...

Excited to share the first manuscript from my PhD in which we leveraged ultra-long Nanopore sequencing, D. melanogaster inbred lines, and a ton of manual validation to investigate the effects of long-read length on population-level structural variant (SV) calling accuracy! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Demographic history, genetic load, and the efficacy of selection in the globally invasive mosquito Aedes aegypti Abstract. Aedes aegypti is the main vector species of yellow fever, dengue, Zika and chikungunya. The species is originally from Africa but has experienced

Excited to see the final version of this paper with @samurscicop.bsky.social and Daniel Matute out in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social!

We took a dive into the complicated demographic history of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and its impact on the distribution of genetic diversity
doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

YouTube video by Ryan Gutenkunst Talk describing the results of GHIST1 at ProbGen 25.

Amid the chaos, it was great to share results from the first Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament at ProbGen25. Watch the talk to learn about the future of GHIST and @andrewhvaughn.bsky.social's nefarious metagaming of demographic inference. 😀 www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_dv...

Recombination and the role of pseudo-overdominance in polyploid evolution Natural selection is an imperfect force that can under some conditions fail to prevent the buildup of deleterious mutations. Small population sizes and the lack of recombination are two such scenarios...

Every day I wake up to new horrors and my Id demands blood but I have written this paper on pseudo-overdominance in polyploids instead www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

These results highlight a key challenge for population-genetic analyses in highly selfing species or low-recombination genomic regions. Check out the paper for a deeper dive into other potentially relevant factors like beneficial mutations, dominance coefficients, and population structure!

If HRI was the cause mis-inference, we’d expect it to be caused by the reduced levels of effective recombination in selfers. Indeed, when we ran simulations with lower recombination (but no selfing), we saw the same patterns of DFE mis-inference.

We hypothesized this mis-inference was caused by HRI, where linked deleterious mutations interact and reduce the efficacy of selection. The site frequency spectrum (SFS) had a U-shape at high selfing rates, a pattern often linked to HRI and not modeled by current DFE inference approaches.

In simulated highly selfing populations, the DFE was mis-inferred by two unique DFE inference methods—nearly neutral and strongly deleterious mutations were overestimated, while mildly deleterious ones were underestimated.

Excited to share my first PhD project with my mentor, @johriparul.bsky.social! We examine how Hill–Robertson interference (HRI) in highly selfing species biases estimates of the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations (DFE).
doi.org/10.1093/evol...
@journal-evo.bsky.social #popgen #evobio

Thrilled to have been part of the inaugural GHIST competition in population genetics inference! Big thanks to the organizers for a fun and challenging event. Congrats to Andrew Vaughn and Ekaterina Noskova for their impressive performance, I'm looking forward to reading about everyone's methods.