Starting August 1, 2008 I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph, see my faculty profile.
I am interested in the genetics of adaptation. I am currently working on models of evolutionary capacitance as a mechanism of adaptation. The models that I am developing focus on the yeast prion [PSI+] and seek to capture the dynamics of recombination, genetic assimilation, and reversibility. My other work has answered questions such as how mutational architecture and population substructure affect the genetics of adaptation. With respect to mutational architecture my initial work focused on when mutations act pleiotropically, that is when they affect more than one character. I have presented results that show how pleiotropic mutation affects the genetic basis of an adaptation and the ability of a population to evolve. In terms of population substructure, I have shown how the genetic basis of two locally adapted populations changes in the presence of gene flow as opposed to when the populations are isolated. More recently, I presented work that bridged two largely separate fields of study in biology, namely quantitative genetics and coalescent and ancestral-recombination graph theory. This work demonstrated how shared common ancestry, that manifests itself in the form of genealogy, shapes multivariate trait evolution.
Recent publications:
- Griswold, C. K., & Masel, J. (2009). Complex adaptations can drive the evolution of the capacitor [PSI], even with realistic rates of yeast sex. PLoS Genet, 5(6), 1000517. (PubMed)
(doi)
- Masel, J., & Griswold, C. K. (2009). The strength of selection against the yeast prion [PSI+]. Genetics, 181(3), 1057-63. (PubMed) (doi)
- Griswold, C. K., Gomulkiewicz, R., & Heckman, N. (2008). Hypothesis testing in comparative and experimental studies of function-valued traits. Evolution, 62(5), 1229-42. (PubMed) (doi)
- Griswold, C. K., Logsdon, B., & Gomulkiewicz, R. (2007). Neutral evolution of multiple quantitative characters: a genealogical approach. Genetics, 176(1), 455-66. (PubMed) (doi)
- Griswold, C. K. (2007). The relationship between the pleiotropic phenotypic effects of a mutation fixed by selection. Heredity, 98(4), 232-42. (PubMed) (doi)
- Griswold, C. K. (2006). Gene flow’s effect on the genetic architecture of a local adaptation and its consequences for QTL analyses. Heredity, 96(6), 445-53. (PubMed) (doi)
- Griswold, C. K. (2006). Pleiotropic mutation, modularity and evolvability. Evol Dev, 8(1), 81-93. (PubMed) (doi)
- Griswold, C. K., & Whitlock, M. C. (2003). The genetics of adaptation: the roles of pleiotropy, stabilizing selection and drift in shaping the distribution of bidirectional fixed mutational effects. Genetics, 165(4), 2181-92. (PubMed)