Ideas For Bifax

Travis PCR'd our 4 Sofkahatchee stippled studfish DNA extractions today. I guess we'll run the gels next week. And, we're preparing for our trip to Cleburne County, AL, on Friday. My plan now is to survey random good-looking streams starting at Hwy 431 in the SW corner of the county and move east on county roads along the southern edge of the Tallapoosa River. There are some reasonably large mountains in this area, so we'll be moving on their northern edge looking at streams running off of them. Like I said before, I have no idea what we'll find; this area is an historic gap in studfish distribution from what I can tell, but the fish should be there in theory.

I've been reading the book Conservation and the Genetics of Populations by Allendorf and Luikart as a broad review/refresher on the subject. The one idea for future work I've gotten from this through the first five chapters is to examine chromosome structure of this species and relatives, i.e. trying to make a good ol' fashioned karyotype. Maybe someone has done this work for all Fundulus species and I just haven't found it yet (I know it's been done for olivaceous and notatus, anyway). But I have no idea how many chromosomes the various studfish species have. And that would be a useful datum for examining the functional genomics of these species. But, we'll see.