Rules of Life - How repeatable is speciation?

Speciation involves the build up of barriers to genetic exchange. Despite this wealth of speciation genomic case studies and the rapid development of methods that allow to infer speciation history from sequence variation, it remains unclear how repeatable (or idiosyncratic) speciation is, that is, to what extent the same genes, genes families and genomic regions are involved in the build up reproductive isolation. This project will examine how repeatable speciation processes are by conducting systematic comparisons between recently diverged species pairs of European butterflies as a test case. The student will analyse population genomic data 18 sister pair species of European butterfly using a novel statistical framework for decomposing patterns of sequence variation into genomic maps of past population processes (e.g. gene flow and background selection) developed in the Lohse Lab.