Julie Peng

Toxic cardiotonic steroids (CTS) act as a defense mechanism in many firefly species (Lampyridae) by inhibiting a crucial enzyme called Na+,K+-ATPase (NKA). While most fireflies produce these toxins internally, species of the genus Photuris acquire them from a surprising source: predation on other fireflies. The contrasting physiology of toxin expos...

Decades of genome-wide mapping have shown that most genetic polymorphisms associated with complex traits are found in non-coding regions of the genome. Characterizing the effect of such genetic variation presents a formidable challenge, and eQTL mapping has been a key approach to understand the non-coding genome. However, comprehensive eQTL maps ar...

Many species of fireflies (Lampyridae) are defended from predation by toxic cardiotonic steroids (CTS), which inhibit the physiologically critical enzyme Na ⁺ ,K ⁺ -ATPase (NKA). While most firefly genera defended by these toxins produce them autogenously, species of the genus Photuris obtain them from a surprising source: predation on other firefl...

The Turkana people inhabit arid regions of east Africa where temperatures are high and water is scarce and they practice subsistence pastoralism, such that their diet is primarily composed of animal products. Working with Turkana communities, we sequenced 367 genomes and identified 8 regions putatively involved in adaptation to water stress and pas...

There is increasing appreciation that, in addition to being shaped by an individual's genotype and environment, most complex traits are also determined by poorly understood interactions between these two factors. So-called "genotype × environment" (G×E) interactions remain difficult to map at the organismal level but can be uncovered using molecula...

There is increasing appreciation that human complex traits are determined by poorly understood interactions between our genomes and daily environments. These "genotype x environment" (GxE) interactions remain difficult to map at the organismal level, but can be uncovered using molecular phenotypes. To do so at large-scale, we profiled transcriptome...

Background and objectives Low socioeconomic status (SES) is consistently associated with chronic stress, poor health, and premature death in high income countries (HICs). However, the degree to which SES gradients in health are universal—or even steeper under contemporary, post-industrial conditions—remains poorly understood. Methodology We quanti...

Although gene duplication is an important source of evolutionary innovation, the functional divergence of duplicates can be opposed by ongoing gene conversion between them. Here, we report on the evolution of a tandem duplication of Na+,K+-ATPase subunit α1 (ATP1A1) shared by frogs in the genus Leptodactylus, a group of species that feeds on toxic...

Gene duplication is an important source of evolutionary innovation, but the adaptive division-of-labor between duplicates can be opposed by ongoing gene conversion between them. Here we document a tandem duplication of Na ⁺ ,K ⁺ -ATPase subunit α1 (ATP1A1) shared by frogs in the genus Leptodactylus , a group of species that feeds on toxic toads. On...

Conservation help from genomics Corals worldwide are under threat from rising sea temperatures and pollution. One response to heat stress is coral bleaching—the loss of photosynthetic endosymbionts that provide energy for the coral. Fuller et al. present a high-resolution genome of the coral Acropora millepora (see the Perspective by Bay and Guerre...

Although reef-building corals are rapidly declining worldwide, responses to bleaching vary both within and among species. Because these inter-individual differences are partly her-itable, they should in principle be predictable from genomic data. Towards that goal, we generated a chromosome-scale genome assembly for the coral Acropora millepora. We...

Predicting how species will respond to selection pressures requires understanding the factors that constrain their evolution. We use genome engineering of Drosophila to investigate constraints on the repeated evolution of unrelated herbivorous insects to toxic cardiac glycosides, which primarily occurs via a small subset of possible functionally-re...

Predicting how species will respond to selection pressures requires identifying the factors that constrain their evolution. The repeated evolution of unrelated herbivorous insects to toxic cardiac glycosides primarily occurs via a small subset of possible functionally-relevant substitutions to Na ⁺ ,K ⁺ -ATPase. We used genome engineering in Drosop...