Homepage of Dr. Reed A. Cartwright

I am a computational evolutionary geneticist working in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston. My research includes projects in population genetics, molecular evolution, and bioinformatics. I am also concerned about the state of biology education in the US and donate my time to support pro-science-education causes.

Selected Research
  • Cartwright RA, Lartillot N, Thorne JL (2011) History Can Matter: Non-Markovian Behavior of Ancestral Lineages. Systematic Biology. doi: 10.1093/sysbio/syr012 [reprint]
  • Price N, Cartwright RA, Sabath N, Graur D, Azevedo RBR (2011) Neutral evolution of robustness in Drosophila microRNA precursors. Molecular Biology and Evolution. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msr029 [reprint]
  • Cartwright RA (2010) Bards, poets, and cliques: Frequency-dependent selection and the evolution of language genes. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology. Dec 30. [reprint]
  • Cartwright RA (2009) Problems and solutions for estimating indel rates and length distributions. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 26:473---480. [reprint]
  • Cartwright RA (2009) Antagonism between local dispersal and self-incompatibility systems in a continuous plant population. Molecular Ecology, 18:2327---2336. [reprint]
  • Cartwright RA (2006) Logarithmic gap costs decrease alignment accuracy. BMC Bioinformatics, 7:527. [reprint]
  • Cartwright RA (2005) DNA assembly with gaps (Dawg): simulating sequence evolution. Bioinformatics, 21(Suppl. 3):iii31---iii38. [reprint]
  • For a complete publication list, see my CV.
Software
  • Dawg: the best simulator of neutral evolution in DNA sequences. Version 2 is in development, and it will harder, better, faster, stronger, and easier to use.
  • Ngila: pairwise sequences alignment with robust evolutionary models.
  • SPAGeDi: spatial analysis of genetic data. Developed by Olivier Hardy and Xavier Vekemans, and I have made major contributions to make the source code portable and packagible.
  • Red Lynx: A flexible population genetic simulator that runs in your browser. Great for teaching.
  • PICS-Ord: A method to extract phylogeny information from hard-to-align regions of multiple sequence alignments.
  • SoFoS: Site Frequency Spectrum Rescaler: A little javascript applet that can rescale site frequency spectra to a common sample size
  • Klineage: A forward simulator of ancestral lineages. Checkout from the subversion repository svn://scit.us/klineage/current.
  • MT-Dispatch: A FastCGI dispatcher for Movable Type blogging software. Full of features that make my life much easier.
  • Xomment: Ajaxify the comments on almost any MT blog
  • KwickXML: Robust formatting plugin for MT blogs. Includes advanced support for LaTeX equations. Checkout from the subversion repository svn://scit.us/misc/kwickxml/current/.
My Websites