Evolutionary Genetics and Genomics

The emphasis of this subject is on understanding how evolutionary forces shape the gene pool, on the use of molecular markers in genome mapping, in dissecting polygenic traits by mapping quantitative trait loci, and in other applications such as phylogenetics and conservation biology. The topics covered will be classical population genetics, the impact of natural selection, processes of speciation, conservation genetics, evolution of development, phylogenetic reconstruction, development of saturated linkage maps, physical mapping of genomes, mapping quantitative trait loci, comparative genomics, functional genomics and high-throughout methods of scoring genetic polymorphisms.

• 1Compare how genes, gene pools, and genomes change through evolutionary time;
• 2Discuss the relationship between molecular genetics and evolutionary biology;
• 3Appraise and critique the written literature and evaluate scholarly debates in evolutionary biology;
• 4Apply methods used to detect and quantify the major evolutionary forces in experimental datasets and from web-based databases of genomic information;
• 5Describe how evolutionary processes are inferred from patterns of genetic variation in space and time; and
• 6Integrate understanding of evolution and conservation biology, development and phylogenetics.