A multi-marker perspective on the evolutionary history of East African cichlid fishes

My PhD work.

In my PhD I was interested to re-assess the species tree of the East African cichlid fishes with a nuclear multi-marker data set - as before mainly mitochondrial genes were used. Therefore I designed a variety of new primer pairs covering both exons and introns and usable in a broad range of cichlid lineages (i.e.Tilapinii to Haplochromini). These primers were used in my main project, in which I inferred the species tree with the concatenation approach and a Bayesian concordance analysis. This let to new hypotheses of the phylogenetic history of the Lake Tanganyika cichlid fishes.
A subset of the markers was also used in a study conducted by Emilia Santos and colleauges to have a phylogenetic hypotheses to further investigate the underlying genetics of the egg-spots.
I was also involved in the report of an undescribed species in Lake Tanganyika, which is genetically related to the cichlids of the Lake Victoria region superflock.

Two ongoing projects are about the MHC diversity of Lake Tanganyikan cichlids and another species tree analysis using a massive data set and *BEAST.

• Date: Updated March 2015

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Stickleback Research

I am currently based in the division "Evolutionary Ecology of Marine Fishes" lead by Thorsten Reusch in the GEOMAR. I am part of the European-funded, international and interdisiplinary BAMBI-project. BAMBI stands for "Baltic Sea Marine Biodiversity...addressing the potential of adaptation to climate change." The main task of this project is to investigate and improve the possibilities of marine species to cope with the rapidly changing Baltic Sea environment. At the GEOMAR our model organism is the marine three-spined stickleback. I will apply next generation sequencing methods to understand the processes of adaptation and evolution.

• Date: Updated March 2015

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