I’m so excited to share that I’ll be starting a position as an Assistant Professor at
@TAMU
in January 2023! I’m thrilled to be joining an amazing group of faculty
@TAMU_Biology
.
Received the official Notice of Award from
@NSF
! My lab is so excited to dig into the "Evolutionary and neurogenomic mechanisms of species discrimination during character displacement". Postdoc job ad coming soon! 🐟🧠🧬
Please share! My lab will be hiring 2-3 postdocs over the coming months to study the genetic basis of behavioral traits in darters using brain transcriptomics & population genomics. First ad is posted here:
#behavior
#popgen
#evolution
#neuroethology
I passed my defense last week with no revisions! 🎉
I’m excited to be starting a postdoc position next month at the University of Minnesota with Suzanne McGaugh(
@turtlemcgaugh
)!
The darter genome paper has been published!
@MolBioEvol
@darterfish24
@jcatchen
Genomic Resources for Darters (Percidae: Etheostominae) Provide Insight into Postzygotic Barriers Implicated in Speciation
#OA
New paper out today in Proceedings B
@RSocPublishing
with
@darterfish24
- Agonistic character displacement of genetically based male colour patterns across darters.
Had a great time visiting
@UWMadison
for an Early Career Scientist Seminar
@UWEvolution
. Got to talk about lots of interesting science, and received this awesome speciation card game from the Payseur lab!
Congratulations, 2022 winners of the ASN Early Career Investigator Award! Pavitra Muralidhar
@pavitra451
(UC Davis), Kim Hoang (Oxford), Chuliang Song
@Chuliang_Song
(McGill), Rachel Moran
@Rachel_L_Moran
(UChicago) and Laura Melissa Guzman
@USC_MEB
(USC).
Excited to have this new cavefish preprint out! We analyzed pattens of local ancestry and behavior across variable pool micro environments in a cave where there is a high amount of admixture between cave and surface Astyanax populations.
New collaborative work from 5 cavefish laboratories finds local evolution of sleep loss within a single hybrid cave. We also identify the circadian gene Cry1A as a potential regulator of sleep differences. Work led by spectacular postdocs
@Rachel_L_Moran
and
@james_jaggard
!
New paper out today in Ecology & Evolution with
@darterfish24
@jcatchen
"Hybridization and postzygotic isolation promote reinforcement of male mating preferences in a diverse group of fishes with traditional sex roles"
#OpenAccess
My lab will study the behavioral and genomic basis of local adaptation and speciation, with particular interest reproductive interactions between species and systems with repeated evolution. I will be hiring so please get in touch if interested or find me
@Evol_mtg
next month!
Happy to see my PhD student
@Tayblack777
's first first-author paper out! She found that darters use chemical cues to identify conspecifics.
"Male recognition of conspecific female chemical cues in a diverse clade of freshwater fishes"
Superstar undergrad Isa Mendoza did an excellent job presenting her first poster at our
@TAMU_Biology
Student-Postdoc Research Conference (with support from her amazing mentor
@mysia_d
!)
Male color functions in male competition in orangethroat & rainbow darters, not female choice. Some components of male color pattern are more divergent in sympatric compared to allopatric population pairings. This incidentally causes divergence among populations within species.
Congratulations Rachel Moran, recipient of a 2018 Student Research Award for work in "Using linkage maps to compare chromosomal structure between two darter species undergoing reinforcement"
Happy
#DarwinDay2018
!
#Istudyevolution
by using behavioral experiments, hybrid crosses, and genomics to understand how interspecific reproductive interactions promote speciation.
We are really disappointed that the
@OfficialSMBE
meeting cannot go ahead this year because of Coronavirus, but we're not letting that stop us entirely! My favourite session, the Fitch Symposium, where young scientists present their doctoral research, is moving online. 30 June
@MolBioEvol
@darterfish24
@jcatchen
We generated an annotated, chromosome-level assembly for the orangethroat darter and linkage maps for orangethroat and rainbow darters. Synteny analyses revealed numerous chromosomal inversions and translocations between orangethroat and rainbow genomes.
Selection to avoid interspecific aggressive interactions promotes the evolution of divergent male color patterns between and within species in darters via agonistic character displacement.
@darterfish24
Two new darter papers published today!
@darterfish24
Male-driven reproductive and agonistic character displacement in sympatry (and its effects on divergence in allopatry):
Females face costs to mate choice via egg overripenning:
@QueerEcoEvo
I am looking to take students in 2023 and 2024! Topics of interest include the behavioral and genomic basis of reproductive isolation/speciation, evolutionary consequences of hybridization, and mechanisms of repeated evolution. (Link to my website with contact info in profile.)
We also scanned lab-generated backcross hybrid genomes for signs of selection against genetic incompatibilities and identified genomic regions potentially associated with postzygotic isolation between orangethroat and rainbow darters.
My friends
@epidemicerin
&
@theedubs
have an excellent podcast on infectious disease and just came out with a six part series on COVID-19. It includes interviews with medical experts and ends with a discussion on mental health/coping strategies. I highly recommend listening!
NEW EPISODE(S) alert! Our
#COVID19
updates are here! With the help of experts, we cover everything from the virus origin to how to protect your own mental health during this crisis. All six episodes are available, along with
#quarantini
and
#placeborita
recipes!
Please get in touch if you are interested in writing an NSF PRFB under Areas 1 or 2! I'd be happy to chat with prospective applicants about ideas (e.g., genomic basis of complex behavioral trait evolution, the neurogenomic basis of speciation).
Excited to have this resource available for darters! Rapture is an affordable RAD sequence capture method that can facilitate genomic studies in diverse groups of non-model taxa.
New preprint led by
@emydoid
in collab with
@Rachel_L_Moran
and Chris Kopak. Rapture-ready darters: sequence capture outperforms whole genome data regardless of reference genome in Etheostoma
Now out: Super fun collab with
@AlexCarlKeene
@turtlemcgaugh
@JohannaKowalko
labs on an amazing example of convergent molecular evolution in cavefish and burrowing rodents. Check out figure 3 and be prepared to 🤯 🤯 🤯
Sleep loss may be adaptive in cavefish, and we found evolved differences in sleep phenotypes across pools are associated with amount of cave ancestry in hybrids. We also found a cool example of convergent evolution in a circadian clock gene between cavefish and naked mole rats!
We used RADseq to show that hybridization is ongoing between orangethroat and rainbow darters and that it has fitness consequences: highly skewed sex ratio in F1s and reduced viability in backcrosses. Suggests reinforcement drives enhanced male pref for conspecifics in sympatry.
@AvrilMHarder
I requested annotation for the orangethroat darter genome and it was done in month (early last year), so faster than I was expecting! They like to have at least 500 million reads of RNAseq data, and can use data from close relatives if needed.
But also missing everyone in the McGaugh
@turtlemcgaugh
and
@yanivbrandvain
labs!! I'm very lucky to have had such supportive mentors and awesome lab mates during my time at UMN.
I'm especially happy to share this preprint because it represents the culmination of three years of work, through COVID and two maternity leaves (and many gaps in childcare!). I'm very lucky to have had such a monumental amount of support & guidance from
@turtlemcgaugh
!
@yanivbrandvain
Same exact thing happened here yesterday afternoon! He had a big lump on the back of his head but it went away. I’ve called the nurse line many times over head bumps haha I think if no loss of consciousness or vomiting just keep an eye on them? Hope she’s feeling ok!