Category Archives: Uncategorized

Roughly halfway embryonic development, half of Triturus embryos die inside their egg. In a new paper in Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution, we follow embryonic development and show that during one specific developmental stage, unimaginatively … Continue reading →

In nature, marbled and crested newts meet in France, where they manage to hybridize, despite being only distantly related. The resulting hybrid offspring are an evolutionary dead end: their fitness is practically zero. In Catalonia people have introduced the Anatolian … Continue reading →

DNA can teach us all kinds or things, but you do need to collect it first, before you are able to read it out. If you study for example hybridization between two species, you need to sample many individuals, from … Continue reading →

Cryptic species are species that look similar – and therefore are classified as a single species, or have been so up to recently – but that have very different DNA. The alpine newt serves as a case in point. It … Continue reading →

One reason that makes crested newts such a cool study system is that the species involved meet at hybrid zones. Where their ranges come into contact, they crossbreed. However, the low fitness of the hybrid offspring prevents the species from … Continue reading →

Most animals are diploid, meaning they have two copies of each chromosome. One of these copies they inherited from their mother and the other one from their father. Sometimes the number of chromosome copies differs. In a new paper out … Continue reading →

How do you determine the ratio of male and female newts in a population? You could try to sex the adults by eye. For younger animals, we now have genetic tools that can accomplish the same thing. But what if … Continue reading →

Over a decade ago, Christine Grossen and colleagues raised an interesting hypothesis that the two versions of chromosome 1 in Triturus newts, 1A and 1B – responsible for the balanced lethal system – used to be distinct versions of a … Continue reading →

‘Target enrichment by sequence capture’ is a nice technique to get plenty of DNA data, for a specific, predetermined part of the genome. You just extract DNA from a sample, cut it up, label it, and then pull out your … Continue reading →

It is quite easy to tell apart males and females of the smooth newt species complex (Lissotriton vulgaris and related species) when observing adults in ponds during the breeding season. They clearly differ by their secondary sexual characteristics: males are … Continue reading →