Masel group

I’m a postdoctoral researcher who has recently joined the Masel group after a stint as a postdoc with Chris Jiggins’ group in Cambridge. I did my PhD at the University of Sussex with Adam Eyre-Walker. 

Generally, I’m interested in understanding patterns of polymorphism and divergence. Currently I am looking at these trends at the protein level, tracing patterns of protein evolution over time. With Adam Eyre-Walker I investigated patterns of both neutral and non-neutral diversity in light of the nearly neutral theory of evolution across species, both analysing empirical data and performing simulations. I am also interested in adaptive evolution, and in my work in the Jiggins’ group I simulated the effects of adaptive introgression on genome scan data to better understand the complex nature of evolution in an adaptive radiation.   

Publications:

James, J, Castellano, D and Eyre-Walker, A (2016) DNA sequence diversity and the efficiency of natural selection in animal mitochondrial DNA. Heredity, 2017 (118). pp. 88-95. ISSN 0018-067X

James, Jennifer E, Lanfear, Robert and Eyre-Walker, Adam (2016) Molecular evolutionary consequences of island colonization. Genome Biology and Evolution, 8 (6). pp. 1876-1888. ISSN 1759-6653

James, Jennifer E, Piganeau, Gwenael and Eyre-Walker, Adam (2016) The rate of adaptive evolution in animal mitochondria. Molecular Ecology, 25 (1). pp. 67-78. ISSN 0962-1083

Castellano, David, James, Jennifer and Eyre-Walker, Adam (2018) Nearly neutral evolution across the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 35 (11). pp. 2685-2694. ISSN 0737-4038