Life in extremes

Deserts are bellwethers for climate change and are outstanding natural laboratories to study biological adaptation. Since the start of my PhD research I seek to advance our general understanding of the genetic basis and evolutionary mechanisms underlying mammalian adaptation to extreme arid/hyper-arid environments. To address this I have been using a set of integrative approaches to study the demographic and adaptive history of North-African foxes and other desert-dwelling species.

Representative publications on this topic include:

1. Joana L. Rocha, Jose C. Brito, Rasmus Nielsen, and Raquel Godinho (2021), Convergent evolution of increased urine concentrating ability in desert mammals (Mammal Review, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/mam.12244)
2. Joana L. Rocha, Raquel Godinho, Jose C. Brito and Rasmus Nielsen (2021), Life in deserts: the genetic basis of mammalian desert adaptation (Trends and Ecology and Evolution; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2021.03.007)
3. Joana L. Rocha, Pedro Silva, Nuno Santos, Monia Nakamura, Sandra Afonso, Abdeljebbar Qninba, Zbyszek Boratynski, Peter H. Sudmant, Jose C. Brito, Rasmus Nielsen‡ and Raquel Godinho‡ (2023), North-African fox genomes show signatures of repeated introgression and adaptation to life in deserts (Nature Ecology and Evolution; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02094-w).

Media highlights on this topic:

1. Searching for adaptation secrets in the Sahara Desert, written by Diana Aguilar-Gómez for the News section of The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at UC Berkeley (QB3-Berkeley)

2. These rare adaptations help animals survive in the desert, written by Jason P. Dinh for the Planet Earth section of Discover Magazine

3. Handling the heat: Desert collaborations unveil the genetic history of how foxes have adapted to a warming climate, written by Samvardhini Sridharan for Climate Change and Life Science section of Berkeley Science Review, Online issue September 24, 2024 (Fall 2023 printed issue 45)