Joseph Matheson
Postdoc
I recently graduated from my EEB Ph.D. with Joanna and am remaining in the lab for a short postdoc. I study different aspects of genetic load, including how deleterious load affects genetic diversity (background selection), substitution load during adaptation (Haldane's cost of selection), and whether beneficial mutations can counteract the accumulation of load. To do this, I built an evolutionary simulation that uses innovative algorithms to handle many loci, allowing for the effects of linkage to be including in the model without sacrificing computational speed. This model is also being used by two other members of the lab (Walid Mawass and Ulises Hernandez) to investigate the accumulation of genetic load.
Publications :
Matheson JD, Bertram J, Masel J. Population deterioration from a realistically high genome-wide deleterious mutation rate can be countered by rare beneficial mutations of asymmetric effect, manuscript in preparation.
Matheson JD, Masel J. (2022) Background selection theory overestimates effective population size for high mutation rates, BioRxiv, preprint
Matheson JD, M Exposito-Alonso, J Masel (2021). Haldane's cost of selection imposes a mild constraint on adaptation, with a high proportion of deaths in A.thaliana being selective, BioRxiv, preprint