Becker to study Channel Island deer mouse

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

 

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MADELEINE BECKER CONDUCTING RESEARCH

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CREDIT: PHOTO PROVIDED BY MADELEINE BECKER.

Becker To Study Channel Island Deer Mouse

Madeleine Becker, a Mason doctoral student studying with Cody Edwards, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs, College of Science; Executive Director, Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation (SMSC), Associate Provost for a Sustainable Earth, Office of the Provost, is set to receive funding for the study: “Controlling for time: disentangling evolutionary and conservation genomics questions using ‘time series museomics’ in the California Channel Island deer mouse.”

Becker will investigate evolutionary and conservation genomics in insular Peromyscus populations to uncover general patterns in isolated wild mammal populations while parsing the influences of founder effects, biogeography, lineage, and recent change. 

By sequencing genome-wide loci from samples spanning 120 years across the eight California Channel Islands, Becker will take a time-series museomics approach to disentangling signatures of island colonization, inter-island migration, and historically documented bottlenecks. 

Additionally, Becker will compare current population-level metrics of inbreeding and mutational load between islands and mainland mice as well as through time. By taking this unconventional approach in a well-studied mammal abundant in museum collections and the wild, she aims to extend the utility of islands as natural laboratories to test common genetic monitoring techniques and better understand baseline patterns of microevolution in isolation. This research will be valuable both in: 1) its evaluation of the success of conservation interventions implemented on the California Channel Islands specifically, and 2) by serving as an important reference point for ex situ conservation efforts hoping to replicate these measures or otherwise mitigate the harmful effects of genetic isolation and bottlenecks in threatened species.

Becker will receive $6,000 as part of an Ecological, Evolutionary, and Conservation Genomics Research Award from the American Genetics Association for this research. Funding will begin in May 2024 and will end in late April 2025.

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