© PAUL SIMCOCKGrowing up on a farm in rural Austria, Doris Bachtrog was “always kind of the black sheep and the outlier in my family,” she recalls. “I cared about education; I was very curious.” She left home at age 13 to attend a boarding school that specialized in teaching chemical engineering.
Bachtrog earned an undergraduate degree in biology, and made use of her quantitative skill set to pursue a master’s thesis in population genetics. She wrote a computer program to identify microsatellites—variable DNA repeats used as genetic markers—in the Drosophila melanogaster genome. This first research experience left her “amazed that there was so much still unknown” about the natural world, Bachtrog says.
One area ripe for investigation with molecular tools was the evolution of sex chromosomes, and Drosophila miranda turned out to be a useful model system. Bachtrog and her PhD advisor, University of Edinburgh biologist Brian Charlesworth, examined sequence variation among four genes on the species’ so-called neo-X and neo-Y chromosomes, which arose around a million years ago from the fusion of an autosome to ...
