New published paper from Samantha‘s PhD work

Samantha V. Beck

Samantha V. Beck, a former PhD student at Holar University (2014-2019) just published a paper out of her PhD work in BMC Developmental Biology, „Differences among families in craniofacial shape at early life-stages of Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus)“.
This is the second paper from Samantha project looking at the importance of egg size and body size differences for diversity in Arctic charr (supervisors: Camille Leblanc, Bjarni K. Kristjánsson and Zophonías Jónsson (HÍ). In this particular work Samantha characterized early phenotypic differences
in Arctic charr (brown morph from Vatnshliðarvatn lake) at the family level.
She stained bones and cartilages of embryos head before hatching (eye stage) and at first feeding. She examined craniofacial shape according to family, offspring size, egg size and gene expression (from Beck et al. 2019). She shows that craniofacial shape varied more between families than within families, both acorss and within developmental stages. Larger offpsring and offspring from females with larger eggs consistently had a wider hyoid arch and contracted Meckel‘s cartilage in comparison to smaller offspring. This early morphological variation was not connected to the relative gene expression of 14 genes tested here (6 genes involved in growth and 8 in skeletogenesis).
Samantha V. Beck just started last month a full time position as a Fisheries Biologist with the Galloway Fisheries Trust in Scotland.

Written by C. Leblanc