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Little is known about the Australian snubfin (Orcaella heinsohni) and Indo-Pacific humpback (Sousa chinensis) dolphins ('snubfin' and 'humpback dolphins', hereafter) of north-western Australia. While both species are listed as 'near threatened' by the IUCN, data deficiencies are impeding rigorous assessment of their conservation status across Australia. Understanding the genetic structure of populations, including levels of gene flow among populations, is important for the assessment of conservation status and the effective management of a species. Using nuclear and mitochondrial DNA markers, we assessed population genetic diversity and differentiation between snubfin dolphins from Cygnet (n = 32) and Roebuck Bays (n = 25), and humpback dolphins from the Dampier Archipelago (n = 19) and the North West Cape (n = 18). All sampling locations were separated by geographic distances >200 km. For each species, we found significant genetic differentiation between sampling locations based on 12 (for snubfin dolphins) and 13 (for humpback dolphins) microsatellite loci (FST = 0.05-0.09; P<0.001) and a 422 bp sequence of the mitochondrial control region (FST = 0.50-0.70; P<0.001). The estimated proportion of migrants in a population ranged from 0.01 (95% CI 0.00-0.06) to 0.13 (0.03-0.24). These are the first estimates of genetic diversity and differentiation for snubfin and humpback dolphins in Western Australia, providing valuable information towards the assessment of their conservation status in this rapidly developing region. Our results suggest that north-western Australian snubfin and humpback dolphins may exist as metapopulations of small, largely isolated population fragments, and should be managed accordingly. Management plans should seek to maintain effective population size and gene flow. Additionally, while interactions of a socio-sexual nature between these two species have been observed previously, here we provide strong evidence for the first documented c

The production of adequate agricultural outputs to support the growing human population places great demands on agriculture, especially in light of ever-greater restrictions on input resources. Sorghum is a drought-adapted cereal capable of reliable production where other cereals fail, and thus represents a good candidate to address food security as agricultural inputs of water and arable land grow scarce. A long-standing issue with sorghum grain is that it has an inherently lower digestibility. Here we show that a low-frequency allele type in the starch metabolic gene, pullulanase, is associated with increased digestibility, regardless of genotypic background. We also provide evidence that the beneficial allele type is not associated with deleterious pleiotropic effects in the modern field environment. We argue that increasing the digestibility of an adapted crop is a viable way forward towards addressing food security while maximizing water and land-use efficiency.

Sorghum is a food and feed cereal crop adapted to heat and drought and a staple for 500 million of the world’s poorest people. Its small diploid genome and phenotypic diversity make it an ideal C4 grass model as a complement to C3 rice. Here we present high coverage (16–45 × ) resequenced genomes of 44 sorghum lines representing the primary gene pool and spanning dimensions of geographic origin, end-use and taxonomic group. We also report the first resequenced genome of S. propinquum, identifying 8 M high-quality SNPs, 1.9 M indels and specific gene loss and gain events in S. bicolor. We observe strong racial structure and a complex domestication history involving at least two distinct domestication events. These assembled genomes enable the leveraging of existing cereal functional genomics data against the novel diversity available in sorghum, providing an unmatched resource for the genetic improvement of sorghum and other grass species.

Habitat fragmentation as a result of urbanisation is a growing problem for native lizard species. The Eastern Water Dragon (Physignathus lesueurii) is a social arboreal agamid lizard, native to Australia. This species represents an ideal model species to investigate the effect of urbanisation because of their prominent abundance in the urban landscape. Here we describe the isolation and characterisation of a novel set of 74 di-, tri-, and tetramicrosatellites from which 18 were selected and optimised into two multiplexes. The 18 microsatellites generated a total 148 alleles across the two populations. The number of alleles per locus varied from 2 to 18 alleles and measures of Ho and He varied from 0.395 to 0.877 and from 0.441 to 0.880, respectively. We also present primers for four novel mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) markers. The combined length of the four mtDNA marker pairs was 2,528 bp which included 15 nucleotides changes. In comparison to threatened species, which are generally characterised by small population sizes, the Eastern Water Dragon represents an ideal model species to investigate the effect of urbanisation on their behavioural ecology and connectivity patterns among populations.

Detecting artificial selection in the genome of domesticated species can not only shed light on human history but can also be beneficial to future breeding strategies. Evidence for selection has been documented in domesticated species including maize and rice, but few studies have to date detected signals of artificial selection in the Sorghum bicolor genome. Based on evidence that domesticated S. bicolor and its wild relatives show significant differences in endosperm structure and quality, we sequenced three candidate seed storage protein (kafirin) loci and three candidate starch biosynthesis loci to test whether these genes show non-neutral evolution resulting from the domestication process. We found strong evidence of non-neutral selection at the starch synthase IIa gene, while both starch branching enzyme I and the beta kafirin gene showed weaker evidence of non-neutral selection. We argue that the power to detect consistent signals of non-neutral selection in our dataset is confounded by the absence of low frequency variants at four of the six candidate genes. A future challenge in the detection of positive selection associated with domestication in sorghum is to develop models that can accommodate for skewed frequency spectrums.

Female mammals play a central role in determination of social structure and are thus central to understanding the overall fission-fusion grouping pattern characteristic of many delphinid societies. Focusing specifically on female-female relatedness and association patterns, I have analysed more than 17 years of group composition, behavioural data, and genetic information to investigate complex interactions between behavioural ecology and relatedness and to also examine the common social evolutionary theory, that variation in mammalian social systems is typically attributed to five main factors: inclusive fitness, predation pressure, sexual conflict and male harassment, inbreeding avoidance, and resource competition. Overall, I found that female bottlenose dolphin association patterns depend upon the interplay between matrilineal kinship, biparental relatedness and home range overlap, and that female bottlenose dolphins seem to adapt their social strategies to seasonal variation in levels of predation and male harassment. The presence of both high sexual conflict and bisexual philopatry lead me to investigate the extent of inbreeding avoidance. I found that more than 14% of the calves were most likely the product of mating between close relatives, and identified female fitness costs to inbreeding. We were able to show that the effect of inbreeding on females’ fitness occurs via two independent mechanisms: being inbred and having at least one inbred calf. Inbred calves are on average weaned later than non-inbred calves, and a female’s first calf has a higher probability to be an inbred than subsequent calves. Last, I examined whether sociality provides inclusive fitness to female bottlenose dolphins through an investigation of both the additive genetic and social variance components of female calving success using a pedigree-free animal model. I found that variance in calving success of female bottlenose dolphins is best explained by complex genetic and soci