The Jones lab is interested in the evolution and underlying genetics of species-specific adaptations. Although critical to our understanding of phenotypic evolution, we know surprisingly little about the molecular basis of these complex traits. The lab’s overall goal is to identify, clone and characterize genes involved in natural adaptations in order to determine the types of genes involved, how many and the nature of the genetic changes, and the evolutionary history of these changes. More specifically, their work focuses on the genetic analysis of adaptations and interspecific differences between Drosophila sechellia and its close relatives, D. simulans and D. melanogaster. D. sechellia has a unique preference for using the fruit of Morinda citrifolia as its host, which is toxic to D. sechellia’s relatives as well as all other species of arthropods tested thus far. The Jones lab is currently analyzing these traits using a combination of QTL, candidate-gene and microarray aproaches.
The Jones lab is also interested in the mechanisms, frequency, or patterns underlying the evolution of new genes. In collaboration with Dr. David Begun at UC Davis, we using several different approaches to identify these new genes. In Drosophila there are several examples of newly evolved genes involving the fusion of alcohol dehydrogenase with another gene. We have recently shown that these genes show remarkably consistent and predicable patterns of evolution.
Dr. Jones is involved in the D. simulans and D. yakuba genome sequencing projects that are currently underway. This sequence information will provide new insight into how genomes evolve such as which types of genes are evolving most rapidly, and what the relationships are between recombination, DNA divergence and DNA polymorphism. We are particularly interested in how the spatial organization of genes affects their function and evolution.
The Jones lab is also interested in developing theoretical, bioinformatic and statistical methods relevant to evolutionary genomics. This research falls into three areas: (1) estimating the number of genes underlying a quantitative trait from mapping data, (2) examining spatial patterns of DNA sequence evolution, and (3) detecting genetic changes due to natural selection.