M. Pennell

Saccharomycotina yeasts defy longstanding macroecological patterns

This study uses machine learning to model global yeast species distributions and finds they defy traditional macroecological patterns.

Alternative mutational architectures producing identical M-matrices can lead to different patterns of evolutionary divergence

The paper shows that different mutational architectures producing the same M-matrix can lead to varying evolutionary outcomes like divergence and adaptation rates.

Decoupling of evolutionary changes in mRNA and protein levels

The paper develops a theoretical model to study coevolution of mRNA and protein levels, finding that stabilizing selection leads to compensatory evolution, while directional selection causes negative correlation across lineages and positive correlation across genes.

Evaluating the Performance of Widely Used Phylogenetic Models for Gene Expression Evolution

The paper evaluates phylogenetic models for gene expression evolution using 8 datasets, finding Ornstein-Uhlenbeck models fit 66% of gene-tissue combinations best and highlighting the importance of accounting for evolutionary rate heterogeneity.

Testing the phylogenetic gambit: how much functional diversity can we reliably conserve if we prioritize phylogenetic diversity?

The paper tests whether maximizing phylogenetic diversity (PD) reliably captures functional diversity (FD) across 15,000 vertebrate species, finding mixed results with an average 18% FD gain but also cases where PD sets had less FD than random selections.

Conserving Phylogenetic Diversity Can Be A Poor Strategy For Conserving Functional Diversity

This paper shows that conserving phylogenetically diverse taxa does not reliably maximize functional diversity, challenging the common assumption that phylogenetic diversity (PD) is a proxy for functional diversity (FD).