Masel group

Graduate Student

Office/Lab: LSS 329

email: jmatheson@email.arizona.edu

I am an EEB Ph.D. student currently studying whether beneficial mutations can prevent populations from having 'died one hundred times over' to a steady accumulation of very small deleterious mutations. To do this, I am working on building an evolutionary simulation that uses innovative algorithms to handle many loci, allowing for the effects of linkage to be including in the model without sacrificing computational speed. This model could also be used to explore other proposed explanations for how populations have avoided accumulating small deleterious mutations, if beneficial mutations prove unable to do so.

Publications

J Matheson, J Masel (2022). Background selection theory overestimates effective population size for high mutation rates bioRxiv, preprint

J Matheson, M Exposito-Alonso, J Masel (2021). Haldane's cost of selection imposes a mild constraint on adaptation, with a high proportion of deaths in A.thaliana being selective, BioRxiv, preprint