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Ben Moran

@ben-moran.bsky.social

169 followers 52 following 10 posts

Schmidt Science Fellow at UC Davis - speciation, conservation, and population genomics

Posts Replies Media

Ben Moran @ben-moran.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Hybrid zones are increasingly common; to what extent are human impacts on the environment the cause? We used pop gen, water chemistry, GIS, and ecotoxicology to explore the causes of hybridization in swordtails. With @mollyschumer.bsky.social, now out in Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol...

cell.com

Increased rates of hybridization in swordtails are associated with water pollution

Anthropogenic disturbance can drive hybridization by altering pre-mating reproductive barriers. Moran et al. pair population genomic surveys with water chemistry and GIS data to show that human develo...

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Ben Moran @ben-moran.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

1/9 Excited to share the preprint for the second half of my PhD with @mollyschumer.bsky.social: Connecting human environmental impacts to hybridization in swordtail fish through genomics, GIS, water chemistry, and histology. Thread below! #SciSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Increased rates of hybridization in swordtail fish are associated with water pollution

Biodiversity loss can occur when disturbance compromises the reproductive barriers between species, causing them to collapse into a single population through hybridization. Recent research has documen...

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Reposted by Ben Moran

Graham Coop @gcbias.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Congrats to @jeffgroh.bsky.social et al on publication of "Ancient structural variants control sex-specific flowering time morphs in walnuts and hickories" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Science magazine front cover. Picture of a walnut in its opened shell. The text reads "All about timing. Mating type evolution in walnuts and pecans"

graphical abstract:
"In Juglans (top left) and Carya, two morphs show complementary temporal separation between male and female flowering (heterodichogamy). Mating types are controlled by two nonhomologous single-locus mechanisms that arose in the common ancestor of each genus, respectively. (Bottom left) Simplified schematic of a putative functional regulatory element at the Juglans locus. (Bottom right) Strong genotypic correlations across the Carya locus indicate a lack of recombination between two colinear haplotypes with similar gene content."

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Reposted by Ben Moran

Molly Schumer @mollyschumer.bsky.social · 10/01/2024

So glad our paper on lethal hybrid incompatibilities is out at Nature today: rdcu.be/dvFcM ! @ben-moran.bsky.social moved mountains for this project: we identified two new incompatibilities in swordtail hybrids , characterize mechanisms of lethality, and their evolutionary history.

rdcu.be

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