A fun little update for April, 2025: I am proud to say that the Olito lab had the unique distinction of having two grad students presenting work at two different conferences on opposite sides of the world! Congrats to both Lila & Ruben for representing the lab with two outstanding talks. Lila presented her PhD research plans here in Lund at our Biology Department’s annual graduate student conference, BLAM. Meanwhile, Ruben was kicking off his first season of field work in Hawaii by introducing himself and his research plans to the annual graduate student conference at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa School of Life Sciences, the Tester’s Symposium.

A fun little trip down memory lane: I gave my first ever scientific presentation at the 33rd Tester’s Symposium in 2008 when I was an undergrad majoring in marine biology at UH. How the time flies!

This one is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Although she’s been in the Lab almost one year, Lila finally has an introductory blog-post on the department website that we can link to. So, welcome, and keep up the great work Lila!

Lila Maladesky – new PhD student

Ruben Cousins Westerberg – new PhD student

Very happy to say my good friend and colleague Homa Papoli-Yazdi has finally put this one to bed! This has been a long time coming: an unfinished thesis chapter that took on a life of its own. But after a few rounds of reincarnation, some really good back-and-forth with Charlie Cornwallis, Homa, and our colleagues around the world, I think we’ve put together a really nice piece of work. Well done Homa! Check it out at PLoS Genetics:

Homa Papoli-Yazdi, C. Olito, T. Kawakami, P. Unneberg, M.F. Schou, S.W.P. Cloete, B. Hansson, C.K. Cornwallis (2023) The evolutionary maintenance of ancient recombining sex chromosomes in the ostrich. PLoS Genetics https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1010801.

My colleagues Jessica Abbott, Katrine Lund-Hansen, and I just had an invited opinion/review piece published in Current Opinions in Genetics and Development about the challenges of measuring and/or predicting fitness under genomic conflict. Check it out here:

Abbott JK, K. Lund-Hansen, and C. Olito (2023). Why is measuring and predicting fitness under genomic conflict so hard? Current Opinions in Genetics and Development 81:102070. doi: 10.1016/j.gde.2023.102070.

I am very pleased to announce the recent acceptance of:

Olito, C. & Abbott, J.K. (2023). The evolution of suppressed recombination between sex chromosomes and the lengths of evolutionary strata. Evolution X: XX–XX. doi: 10.1093/evolut/qpad023

Just saw this very nice perspective on Tim’s and my paper about expected distributions of autosomal inversion lengths under different selection scenarios by Dr. Andrius Dagilis, to appear in Molecular Ecology alongside our paper. Very cool (not that we are biased)!

This was a special one 🥳 It all started in Montpellier 2019 at a meeting of the ESEB Special Topics Network “Linking sex differences in selection with local adaptation” when I listened to my now good friend and colleague Dr. Lotte de Vries give an awesome talk about her Ph.D. thesis research on evolutionary demographic models. 3 years, 2 postdocs, 1 pandemic, and many Zoom meetings later, I am very happy and proud to say that the frenzied geek-out we had after that talk was the beginning of an awesome collaboration which has now resulted in an outstanding paper in The American Naturalist (not that I’m biased). I really do hope this is the first of many!

Olito, C. & C. de Vries (2022) The demographic costs of sexually antagonistic selection in partially selfing populations. The American Naturalist doi: 10.1086/720419.

Another one that took a long time to come to fruition, but it’s finally out… Very happy to announce this recent paper with my colleagues here at the Genetics of Sex Differences Research Group at Lund University. This was a great instance of a paper being born the way they ought to be: from discussions started during a lab journal club meeting! Congrats everyone!

Olito, C., S. Ponnikas, B. Hansson, J.K. Abbott (2022). Consequences of partially recessive genetic variation for the evolution of inversions suppressing recombination between sex chromosomes. Evolution. doi: 10.1111/evo.14496.