Dr. Remi Ketchum (Postdoctoral Fellow – Schrider Lab) received a new K99/R00 award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for her project titled “Novel methods for detecting positive selection in mosquitoes”.
The proposed research will first develop a new fundamental method that corrects for model mis-specification when performing selection inference and then test this method on populations of the yellow fever mosquito to explicate the genomic underpinnings of rapid adaptation to insecticides (Aim 1). Next, it will use long-read based approaches to explore the role of structural variation (genomic variation >50bp) in rapid adaptation. It will combine cutting-edge assembly- and read-based approaches to explore the repeatability of the targets of selection across distinct environments to insecticide pressures (Aim 2). The final aim will focus on developing the first machine learning tool to detect a relatively understudied form of rapid adaptation, namely adaptive tracking, where fluctuating selective pressures result in repeatable adaptive shifts in allele frequencies over seasonal and sub-seasonal timescales. This novel approach will be used to characterize the targets of fluctuating selection in a major disease vector and assess whether the presence of strong direction selection alters the degree, tempo, and targets of adaptive tracking (Aim 3).