Leonie C. Moyle, Ph.D.

Arbeitsvorhaben

Mechanisms of Speciation in the 21st Century

Speciation—the biological process through which all new species arise—has received more than a century and a half of scrutiny since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Over that time, the study of the speciation process has itself evolved, as new theoretical and empirical advances have resolved some questions and opened additional ones. Contemporary speciation research is in the throes of another such transition. The causes of this transition are diverse, but one substantial factor is the vast increase in our access to “genomic” information: we now can characterize the complete set of DNA sequence variation in almost any organism, on a scale and level of detail unprecedented even two decades ago. The consequences of this empirical shift have been widespread across biology—influencing both the way that researchers ask and answer biological questions, and how they conceptualize foundational processes. This is equally true of studies of the process of speciation specifically, but our foundational concepts, questions, and texts have lagged behind these changes. As a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, my goals are to clarify and synthesize these new empirical advances in speciation biology. This will entail clarifying the conceptual implications of genomic data for how we think about the formation of species, how we make inferences about the speciation process from empirical data, and even about the nature of species themselves. I anticipate that this project will involve three major synthesis and writing projects, one of which will be a book prospectus.

Recommended Reading

Moyle, Leonie C., and Takuya Nakazato (2010). “Hybrid Incompatibility ‘Snowballs’ between Solanum Species.” Science 329: 1521–1523. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1193063.
Pease, James B., David C. Haak, Matthew W. Hahn, and Leonie C. Moyle (2016). “Phylogenomics Reveals Three Sources of Adaptive Variation during a Rapid Radiation.” PLoS Biology 14: e1002379. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002379.
Gibson, Matthew J. S., María de Lourdes Torres, Yaniv Brandvain, and Leonie C. Moyle (2021). “Introgression Shapes Fruit Color Convergence in Invasive Galápagos Tomato.” eLife 10: e64165. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64165.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Moyle, Leonie C. (Cambridge, 2021)

Introgression shapes fruit color convergence in invasive Galápagos tomato

Moyle, Leonie C. (Lawrence, KS, 2016)

Phylogenomics reveals three sources of adaptive variation during a rapid radiation

Moyle, Leonie C. (2016)

Assortative mating and self-fertilization differ in their contributions to reinforcement, cascade speciation, and diversification