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The study of speciation draws on nearly all facets of evolutionary research, from macroevolutionary patterns revealed by paleontology and biogeography, to microevolutionary processes of genetic change at the population and molecular level. In my research, I apply a variety of genetic approaches to the study of marine invertebrates and fish whose life histories, mating strategies, and geographical distributions offer novel opportunities for understanding speciation.
My current projects involve using cDNA sequences for the sperm-borne fertilization protein lysin and its egg-borne compliment VERL to explore speciation mechanisms in the marine snail Tegula, and employing an EST-based strategy to generate nuclear sequence markers for inferring population history and species status in corals. Additional projects examine the physiological and ecological consequences of phylogeographic breaks within species, and combine genetic data with paleobiological work (in collaboration with Kaustuv Roy at UCSD) to study the biological consequences of geographical range changes in temperate marine snails.
Taylor, M. S. and M. E. Hellberg. 2003. Genetic evidence for local retention of pelagic larvae in a Caribbean reef fish. Science 299: 107-109.
Baums, I. B., M. W. Miller and M. E. Hellberg. 2005. Regionally isolated populations of an imperilled Caribbean coral, Acropora palmata. Molecular Ecology, 14: 1377-1390.
Taylor, M. S. and M. E. Hellberg. 2005. Marine radiations at small geographic scales: speciation in Neotropical reef gobies (Elacatinus). Evolution, Evolution 59: 374-385.
Taylor, M. S. and M. E. Hellberg. 2006. Comparative phylogeography of a genus of coral reef fishes: biogeographical and genetical concordance in the Caribbean. Molecular Ecology, 15: 695-707.
Hellberg, M. E. 2006. No variation and low synonymous substitution rates in coral mtDNA despite high nuclear variation. BMC Evolutionary Biology 6:24.
Dixon Shully, S. and M. E. Hellberg. 2006. Positive selection on nucleotide substitutions and indels in accessory gland proteins of the Drosophila pseudoobscura subgroup. Journal of Molecular Evolution, in press.