Rachel Moran
@Rachel_L_Moran
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Assistant Professor @TAMU_Biology | Behavior, genomics, and complex trait evolution in fishes | she/her
College Station, TX
Joined October 2014
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My multi-talented grad student, Taylor Black, made us a lab a logo!
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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
.
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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! 🐟🧠🧬
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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
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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
)!
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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
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New paper out today in Proceedings B
@RSocPublishing
with
@darterfish24
- Agonistic character displacement of genetically based male colour patterns across darters.
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New preprint! Hybridization, postzygotic isolation, and reinforcement of male mating preferences in darters.
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First time out seining this spring! Found lots of rainbow darter and greenside darter males in breeding coloration.
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Inaugural filling of our DIY flow through system! (My lab is amazing and built all of this from scratch, I just contributed funds 😂)
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My main postdoc project with
@turtlemcgaugh
, "Selection-driven trait loss in independently evolved cavefish populations" now out
@NatureComms
!
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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!
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Submitted my (hopefully) final RAD library for my dissertation! 🤞
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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).
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Kicking off our first Fall semester as a lab with a fish-themed group photo! 🐟
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New
#cavefish
#popgen
preprint! The major focus of my postdoc work with many great collaborators
@turtlemcgaugh
@JohannaKowalko
@emjrichards1
@patyornelas71
@NicolasRohner
@AlexCarlKeene
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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
!
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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
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Excited to be back in Chicago and looking forward to starting some fun new projects at
@UChicago
!
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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!
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Very proud of my grad student
@Tayblack777
and postdoc
@mysia_d
for their excellent poster presentation and talk at
#Evol2023
!
@TAMU_Biology
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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"
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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
!)
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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.
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Thanks
@ASNAmNat
and
@sse_evolution
for the student research grants! Excited to do more darter genomics!
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"
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Happy
#DarwinDay2018
!
#Istudyevolution
by using behavioral experiments, hybrid crosses, and genomics to understand how interspecific reproductive interactions promote speciation.
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Some good news: these two got their first dose of covid vaccine!! 🎉
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I’m looking forward to talking about some of my dissertation research for the
@OfficialSMBE
Fitch Symposium, and can’t wait to hear the other talks!
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
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@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.
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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
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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:
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@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.)
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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.
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Had a fun morning at the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center. We even saw some Texas fishes!
@HoustonArboretu
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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!
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The Fall 2017 "Girls Go For It" program is off to a great start - developing leadership skills and building self-confidence!
#girlsgoforit
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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).
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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
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Excited to see this in print!
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 🤯 🤯 🤯
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Excited to be in San Diego at
#NABT
to present our high school evolution unit on animal signaling traits!
@darterfish24
@ImpactSciEd
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Congrats to my labmates Michelle St. John & Lisa Mitchem who both did awesome jobs defending their masters theses this week!
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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!
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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.
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Join us today at the
@calacademy
Virtual Genomic Social Hour at 11 am PT/1 pm CT to talk about Genomics and Phylogeography in Cavefishes !
@MontereyFishLab
@AardemaMatthew
@ihartcaves
& Jairo Arroyave
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@Etheostomatt
@J8kTheSn8k
@TJNear
@donaldorth
@jennygumm
@GoforthLab
@moxostoma
@SolomonRDavid
Looks like an orangethroat to me!
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New preprint: Egg overripening in darters and its implications for female mate choice
Egg viability decreases rapidly with time since ovulation in the rainbow darter: implications for ...
#bioRxiv
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@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.
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Our results suggest that genes with larger mutational targets are more likely to be the substrate of repeated adaptive evolution.
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In the new
@indfnsofplnts
video Matt &
@Grant_Cz
check out the "weeds" in our backyard (with a very brief cameo by myself &
@sjohnson4888
😂)
A new video has arrived! Get to know the so-called "weeds" of suburbia. Native or not, there are many plant...
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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.
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My PhD student
@Tayblack777
made a coloring book of endemic Texas Fishes with
@TPWDnews
!
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@vscooper
@evolscientist
@turtlemcgaugh
@NatureComms
@RELenski
Thanks, Vaughn! When writing this paper we definitely thought a lot about the foundational insights that have come out of the LTEE regarding new mutations and adaptive evolution.
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Many thanks to our awesome collaborators for all of their work on this massive project
@JohannaKowalko
@AlexCarlKeene
@NicolasRohner
@patyornelas71
@emjrichards1
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Awesome new podcast on infectious disease by
@Illinois_Alma
grad students Erin Allmann Updyke (
@epidemicerin
) & Erin Welsh!
@tpwky
Episode 1 is here!! We talk all about
#influenza
and the 1918 pandemic! Check us on
#iTunes
#googleplay
or wherever you get your
#podcasts
!
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Has anyone used ExtractMe DNA isolation kits from blirt? (I’m curious because their prices on 96-well extraction kits look great!)
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@indfnsofplnts
Luckily my flu shot seems to be working!! I’m making Grant wear a mask around the house though 😷 😂
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@mbenskydesigns
@TAMU
@TAMU_Biology
Thanks, Miles! And yes I was going to talk to you about a logo!!
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@SolomonRDavid
That longnose gar patiently posed for pics with several ichthyology students at the
@INHSillinois
Illinois River Station haha
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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
!
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@FarrahNMadison
@UWMadison
@UWEvolution
Yes great meeting you and hearing a little about your research!!
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Having fun at
@meec2018kbs
!
Amazing science in MI! Interesting talks
@meec2018kbs
today.
@GEEBatUIUC
is totally rocking the
#FemSTEM
today:
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@tamefoxtime
@TAMU
@TAMU_Biology
@EmInSTEM
Thanks, Halie!
@EmInSTEM
we’ll have to meet up once I’m there!
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@MariaStager
@chevironlab
@JonVelotta
@keelycorder
@colejwolf
@emilygeneticist
@k_wilsterman
@RenaMSchweizer
Congrats, Dr. Stager! 🎉🍾
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@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!
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