Introducing Gašper

Introduction of the new member of BTRG, PhD student under "Young Researcher" program, financed by the Slovenian Research Agency for the next 4.5 years:

My name is Gašper Pustovrh and I study genetics. I love to do things that involve water - like fishing, underwater fishing, free diving, etc. I graduated from veterinary medicine I already as an undergraduate student I knew I want to work with fishes. That is why I applied for a young researcher at the Chair of Genetics, Animal Biotechnology and Immunology in the Balkan trout restoration group. I am trying to find new markers that can differentiate Marble trout from Brown trout which is of great importance in preservation of the Marble trout.

Field trip (sep 2008) - photos

As promised, here are pictures from Morocco. Most of pictures are by Johannes and some from Aleš's trip from 2006. Saša's camera was stolen somewhere on the way back home.

Field trip (sep 2008)

BTRG went to Morocco trying to get more brown trout samples for genetic analysis being performed in co-operation with Mohamed Ghamizi and Said Janjani, both from University Cadi Ayyad, Marrakech, and Patrick Berrebi. Aleš, Saša and Johannes crisscrossed the country searching mainly for brown trout from the Mediterranean drainage.

Brown trout of Atlantic lineage was recently found in Sicily, therefore populations in North Africa might represent a link to populations of Atlantic lineage in Spain. Preliminary genetic analysis of Moroccan brown trout confirmed that at least those from the Atlantic drainage appear to be closely related to brown trout from Iberian Peninsula. Previously, Bo Delling has studied Moroccan brown trout from morphological perspective, now, we intend to analyse them also from the genetic perspective.

Picture gallery will be uploaded in the next few days.

Workshop in La Fouly

Andrej participated in a workshop "Managing adaptive genetic variation in conservation biology" organized by the University of Lausanne in La Fouly, Switzerland, between 3-6 September 2008. Invited speakers and participants presented theoretical and practical examples of how to detect and manage traits that are under selection in a specific local environment. Andrej presented his work in progress "Establishing a brood stock of least introgressed native brown trout from admixed populations".

Some pictures from the workshop can be found here.

Picnic

Chair of Genetics, Animal Biotechnology and Immunology (where most of the balkan-trout team works) organized the second annual picnic. There was a lot of things to celebrate: the end of the school year, Tamara's PhD, Peter's birthday and good grades received by the entire research group.

More pictures available here.

New PhD

Tamara Rozman successfully defended her PhD thesis "Characterization of transferrin locus and its application in phylogenetic analysis of genus Salmo", available here. Transferrin was the marker of choice because mitochondrial markers and microsatellites (frequently used nuclear markers) have several limitations when used in phylogenetic studies. A major problem was ancient tetraploidization of salmonid genome resulting in two actively transcribed transferrin loci.

Tamara was involved in this project for a long time, partially because of this and this reason, and also because the study was carried out on third generation of marble trout × brown trout hybrids (generation time 2-3 years).

Vrljika paper

Vrljika softmouth trout paper was just published. Overview here.