MaBS

Institute for Population Genetics
University of Veterinary Medicine
Veterinärplatz 1
A-1210 Vienna
T: +43 (0) 1 25077 4303
F: +43 (0) 1 25077 4390
claudia.bank[AT]univie.ac.at

During my undergraduate studies of mathematics and physics in Bielefeld I specialized in biomathematics. Successively, I moved to Vienna to do my PhD under the supervision of Joachim Hermisson. As an associated student of the "Vienna Graduate School of Population Genetics" at the Vetmeduni Vienna, I am enjoying close interactions with people from different fields of biology, such as natural variation, functional genetics, genome evolution, bioinformatics and biostatistics. This environment challenges me to broaden my knowledge about various topics in order to be able to discuss the work of my fellow scientists. My particular interest lies in the population genetics of adaptation and speciation.

The goal of my PhD is to develop and analyze mathematical models that help discover the importance of particular speciation mechanisms in various stages of the speciation process. The following projects are part of my PhD thesis:

Origin and maintenance of Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities (DMIs) in parapatry

We use classical two-locus migration-selection models to study to which extent the Dobzhansky-Muller model can be transferred to parapatric scenarios. Hereby, we focus on determining the limiting rate of gene flow that still allows for emergence/maintenance of a DMI. Doing this, we identify two different mechanisms that can drive this process. (Collaboration with Joachim Hermisson and Reinhard Bürger, manuscripts in preparation.)

Can reinforcement complete speciation?

For different four- and five-locus models of a female preference that acts on a male trait, we derive straightforward analytical expressions that characterize the strength of reinforcement at the end of a speciation process. This is achieved using the multi-locus modeling framework developed by Barton and Turelli (1991) together with a newly developed "quasi-linkage disequilibrium" approximation (Claudia Bank, Joachim Hermisson and Mark Kirkpatrick: Can reinforcement complete speciation? Evolution, in press).

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