The last two weeks have been quite successful with two new papers on the publication side, one of them in Scientific Reports and another one in Molecular Ecology.

The latter paper is somewhat special to me. Christian, Karl, Ivan from Hohenheim, and myself characterized five Arabidopsis thaliana populations from the Italian Alps genomically as well as phenotypically. We found some nice signals which suggest local adaptation to different altitudes (up to 2,350 meters) and their environments and we also studied how their demographic history relates to the last glacial maximum. So why is this one special? This is not just my last Arabidopsis paper for a while. It is also the first study where I was involved in planning the experiments as well as the sequencing. It was the reason for visiting Graham’s lab in Davis and the reason for developing Bayenv2 with him. That was almost five years ago, so working on the actual publication took a lot longer than intended but it has been quite exciting to work on it and the process itself has involved some very important steps towards “growing up”.