William A. Cresko <wcresko@uoregon.edu>
New course as of Fall 2005
Course Description:
Organismal populations and species can become endangered when their normal habitats are lost or altered. These problems are partly due to changes in genetic diversity. Genetics is of fundamental importance to conservation biology for several reasons. The level of heterozygosity within a population is often related to fitness in a variety of ways that may reduce the viability of populations in fragmented habitats, and increase extinction probabilities for entire species. In addition, the rate of evolutionary change is proportional to available genetic diversity, the loss of which may retard the rate and breadth of evolution in response to habitat loss. Lastly, all of life’s library is encoded by DNA, and loss of genetic diversity will not only limit biological responses to global environmental change, but may hinder human endeavors by removing a vast repository of resources for future discoveries in everything from drugs to materials to potential energy sources.
Conservation genetics as a field aims to understand the effects of habitat loss, exploitation, and/or environmental change on the genetic composition of natural populations, and how these changes affect the viability of these populations. In addition, defining evolutionarily significant units for management decisions is an important goal of conservation genetics. Lastly, conservation geneticists are often called on to make prescriptions for maintaining biological diversity, and to explain the importance to human well being for doing so. These three areas employ tools and techniques from population, quantitative and molecular genetics, as well as systematics and phylogenetics. This course will provide a foundation for the acquisition, interpretation, and management decision-making process using all of these types of genetic data. As such, the focus will be on practical aspects of these fields. Those students interested in a more thorough conceptual or mathematical grounding in these topics should also consider taking the department’s course offerings in population genetics, quantitative genetics, phylogenetics or molecular evolution.
Course outline (Each section will cover approximately two weeks of the course):
1. Measurement tools
a. Nested levels of variation (among individuals, populations & species)
b. Molecular vs. phenotypic variation
c. Molecular markers (allozymes, microsats & SNPs, oh my!)
d. Conservation genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics
2. Interpretative tools
a. F-statistics, AMOVA and their ilk
b. Assignment tests for sex, parentage, kinship & population membership
c. The coalescent, gene flow and metapopulation dynamics
d. Phylogeography and molecular phylogenetics
3. Causes of genetic diversity loss (and how it can be regained)
a. Habitat fragmentation and loss of genetic diversity
b. Effective population sizes (Ne) vs. minimum viable population sizes
c. Extinction probabilities
d. Hybridization, mutational variance and lateral gene transfer
4. Consequences of genetic diversity loss
a. Inbreeding depression and mutational load
b. Disease susceptibility
c. Adaptation to human-caused changing environments
d. Quantitative genetics and QTLs in conservation genetics
e. Speciation
5. Genetic Identification, Inventory and Analysis
a. Evolutionary Significant Units (ESU) and management units
b. Interpretation and management decisions using genetic data
c. Making the best decisions when no one option is ideal
6. Graduate presentations
Prerequisites:
BI320 and BI380 or consent of instructor.