Upcoming Seminars
Seminars take place on Wednesdays at 08:30 PT / 11:30 ET / 16:30 UK time during the academic year, from roughly September through June. Below is the full schedule for upcoming seminars.
If you would like to present your work in a future public STATE OF THE ARG seminar, please complete this Google Form. We welcome talks on methodological and empirical advances related to ancestral recombination graphs, population genomics, statistical genetics, evolutionary genetics, and related topics.
Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra
University of California, Davis
ARGuing with data: tree sequences in real plant genomes
November 18, 2026
Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) are powerful tools for reconstructing the evolutionary history of a sample. ARGs are growing increasingly popular in empirical evolutionary genetics, used to answer questions ranging from geographic spread to the timing of mutations, selection on quantitative traits, or the identification of admixture. Most applications of ARGs, however, have been limited to human genomics, and the few uses in other species have mostly taken ARG estimation from real data as a given. Here, I highlight some of the challenges in applying ARGs to real plant genomes, from repeats to indels and ancestral states, and the merits of short reads and whole-genome alignments. I then present several different use cases: testing the origin of a key domestication allele, identifying selection on transposable elements, and highlighting the demographic impact of European colonization on American crops.