Postdoctoral Fellow
I am interested in everything to do with biological evolution. I want to know how life works, and why it works the way it does.
The unifying theme of my research so far has been the paradox of variation: since new variants are almost always deleterious, how do ecological and evolutionary processes interact to generate and maintain the natural variation that is the fuel for evolutionary change and adaptation?
My PhD work at the University of Otago focused on theoretical population genetic models of the maintenance of variation under frequency dependent selection. Together with Hamish Spencer I worked on a very general model of genotypic frequency-dependence with multiple alleles and diploidy. I remain interested in the mystery of the selective maintenance of genetic variation and continue to work on models of FDS (including some that explore drift and population structure) when Joanna is not looking.
After joining the Masel lab I thought a lot about evolutionary capacitance and adaptation from cryptic genetic variation. Where my PhD work asked only ‘why are there so many alleles?’, next I wanted to know if and how selection on standing genetic variation contributes to adaptation and evolvability. I was involved in projects dealing with both the evolution of capacitance in general, and the specific [PSI+] capacitor system in yeast.
Publications:
- Trotter, M.V.,Weissman, D.B., Peterson, G., Peck, K., Masel, J. Cryptic genetic variation can make irreducible complexity a common mode of adaptation, in preparation.
- Masel, J., & Trotter, M. V. (2010). Robustness and Evolvability. Trends in Genetics, 26(9), 406-414. (PubMed)
- Trotter, M. V., & Spencer, H. G. (2009). Complex dynamics occur in a single-locus, multiallelic model of general frequency-dependent selection. Theoretical Population Biology, 76(4), 292-298. (PubMed)
- Trotter, M. V., & Spencer, H. G. (2008). The generation and maintenance of genetic variation by frequency-dependent selection: constructing polymorphisms under the pairwise interaction model. Genetics, 180(3), 1547-1557. (PubMed)
- Star, B., Trotter, M. V., & Spencer, H. G. (2008). Evolution of fitnesses in structured populations with correlated environments. Genetics, 179(3), 1469-1478. (PubMed)
- Trotter, M. V., & Spencer, H. G. (2007). Frequency-Dependent Selection and the Maintenance of Genetic Variation: Exploring the Parameter Space of the Multiallelic Pairwise Interaction Model. Genetics, 176(3), 1729-1740. (PubMed)