German Lagunas-Robles

• Doctor of Philosophy
• PostDoc Position at Indiana University Bloomington

The XX/XY sex chromosome system is deeply conserved in therian mammals, as is the role of Sry in testis determination, giving the impression of stasis relative to other taxa. However, the long tradition of cytogenetic studies in mammals documents sex chromosome karyotypes that break this norm in myriad ways, ranging from fusions between sex chromos...

Significance Some social insects exhibit split sex ratios, wherein a subset of colonies produce future queens and others produce males. This phenomenon spawned many influential theoretical studies and empirical tests, both of which have advanced our understanding of parent–offspring conflicts and the maintenance of cooperative breeding. However, pr...

Supergenes, regions of the genome with suppressed recombination between sets of functional mutations, contribute to the evolution of complex phenotypes in diverse systems. Excluding sex chromosomes, most supergenes discovered so far appear to be young, being found in one species or a few closely related species. Here, we investigate how a chromosom...

Ants exhibit many complex social organization strategies. One particularly elaborate strategy is supercoloniality, in which a colony consists of many interconnected nests (=polydomy) with many queens (=polygyny). In many species of Formica ants, an ancient queen number supergene determines whether a colony is monogyne (=headed by single queen) or p...

Sexually reproducing organisms usually invest equally in male and female offspring. Deviations from this pattern have led researchers to new discoveries in the study of parent-offspring conflict, genomic conflict, and cooperation. Some social insect species exhibit the unusual population-level pattern of split sex ratio, wherein some colonies speci...