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Vines, Timothy H.; Dalziel, Anne C.; Albert, Arianne; Veen, Thor; Schulte, Patricia Marita; Schluter, Dolph; Albert, Arianne Y. K. — 2016-03-25 Strong ecological selection on a genetic locus can maintain allele frequency differences between populations in different environments, even in the face of hybridization. When alleles at divergent loci come into tight linkage disequilibrium, selection acts on them as a unit and can significantly reduce gene flow. For populations interbreeding across a hybrid zone, linkage disequilibria between loci can force clines to share the same slopes and centers. However, strong ecological selection on a locus can also pull its cline away from the others, reducing linkage disequilibrium and weakening the barrier to gene flow. We looked for this ‘cline uncoupling’ effect in a hybrid zone between stream resident and anadromous sticklebacks at two genes known to be under divergent natural selection (Eda and ATP1a1) and five morphological traits that repeatedly evolve in freshwater stickleback. These clines were all steep and located together at the top of the estuary, such that we found no evidence for cline uncoupling. However, we did not observe the stepped shape normally associated with steep concordant clines. It thus remains possible that these clines cluster together because their individual selection regimes are identical, but this would be very surprising given their diverse roles in osmoregulation, body armor and swimming performance. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Vines, Timothy H.; Albert, Arianne Y. K.; Andrew, Rose L.; Débarre, Florence; Bock, Dan G.; Franklin, Michelle T.; Gilbert, Kimberly J.; Moore, Jean-Sébastien; Renaut, Sébastien; Rennison, Diana J. — 2014-11-05 Policies ensuring that research data are available on public archives are increasingly being implemented at the government, funding agency, and journal level. These policies are predicated on the idea that authors are poor stewards of their data, particularly over the long term, and indeed many studies have found that authors are often unable or unwilling to share their data. However, there are no systematic estimates of how the availability of research data changes with time since publication. We therefore requested datasets from a relatively homogenous set of 516 articles published between 2 and 22 years ago, and found that availability of the data was strongly affected by article age. For papers where the authors gave the status of their data, the odds of a dataset being extant fell by 17% per year. In addition, the odds that we could find a working email address for the first, last or corresponding author fell by 7% per year. Our results reinforce the notion that, in the long term, research data cannot be reliably preserved by individual researchers, and further demonstrate the urgent need for policies mandating data sharing via public archives.