​

 

During the first year of my master’s degree, I had the chance of working in Richard Merrill’s behavior and speciation group at Ludwig Maximillian’s University of Munich. Under the guidance of Dr. Lucie Queste, I contributed to a project aimed at examining the genetics of butterfly wing shape, which is crucial to understanding speciation-with-gene-flow. Butterflies display remarkable diversity in wing morphology, which is associated with the vast array of ecological niches they occupy. The Heliconius genus is a widely used model organism in evolutionary biology, and knowledge of the position and effect sizes of loci affecting ecologically divergent traits provides insights into how genome structure affects speciation-with-gene-flow. Our research aimed to quantify wing shape variation in offspring from backcross broods and identify the genomic regions that influence wing shape variation. I performed a geometric morphometric analysis to quantify wing shape variation, followed by univariate QTL analysis assuming a single QTL model using R. This was my first research experience as a graduate student, and it was especially challenging because I also held down a part-time job as a lab technician. 

​