Ecoimmunology. The immune system of bats is capable of highly effective virus control. This ability appears to become compromised when bats are energetically stressed, such as during pregnancy. Migration is also highly demanding, but its effect on the bat immune response is poorly understood. With my collaborators in Mexico, I am studying the link between migration, immune response, and virus load in bats using the lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) as our main study system. The females of this small, nectar-feeding bat migrate bi-annually along the north-south direction in Mexico to follow the bloom of their main food source, the flowers of columnar cactus and agave.
Transposable elements. Uncontrolled activity of transposable elements (TEs) can disrupt host genome function and is therefore often tightly regulated. Sex-limited chromosomes (Y and W) tend to accumulate TEs, but the functional and evolutionary consequences of a TE overabundance on sex chromosomes are poorly understood. I am studying TE abundance and expression in European crows (Corvus corone sp.), with a particular focus on expression differences between males and females.
Evolutionary Genetics. To study the evolutionary history of populations and species I have used a combination of demographic inference and climate niche modelling. Research questions have included the origin an spread of domestic horse (Warmuth et al. 2012, PNAS); the spread of humans into the Americas (Raghavan et al. 2015, Science), and the impact of past climate change on population dynamics of pied flycatchers .
RECENT ARTICLES
Weissensteiner MH, Bunikis I, Catalán A, Francoijs K-J, Knief U, Heim W, Peona V, Pophaly SD, Sedlazeck FJ, Suh A,
Warmuth VM, Wolf JB (2020) The population genomics of structural variation in a songbird genus. Nat Comm 11 (1), 1-11.
Gemmel NJ, Rutherford K, Prost S, Tollis M, Winter D, Macey JR, Adelson DL, Suh A, Bertozzi T, Grau JH, Organ C, Gardner PP, et
al. (2020) The Tuatara genome: insights into vertebrate evolution from the sole survivor of an ancient reptilian order. Nature 584
(7821), 403-409.