After returning from PSA Montreal, I heard that Travis Williams won two awards this year – the Best Graduate Student Presentation award (Genetics & Genomics section), and the Hy-Line International Genetics award. We await more details, but that is fantastic news. Congrats Travis! a well earned award. Travis gave his talk titled “Evaluation of the suitability of cloacal swabs to characterize cecal microbiota profiles in chicken”.
Just returned from the Poultry Science Association annual meeting in Montreal, Canada. We had a strong solid meeting as a lab. I chaired the Genetics and Genomics sessions this year, and graduate students Jamie Alfieri, Travis Williams both presented talks, while Mohamed presented his poster (in absentia). Montreal was also a fun place to visit.
We received a an grant from the Department of Defense – US Army Corps of Engineers to perform a range wide genetic survey of the endangered Golden-Cheeked Warbler. With the help of this two year award, we will be a) generating a genome assembly of the GCWA and b) using genome sequencing to assess population genetic trends, genetic diversity, and gene flow among various sites across Texas. This news was recently highlighted on AgriLife Today and on research.tamu.edu. Read more…
Shawna Marie Hubert, first graduate student of the Athrey Lab successfully defended her Ph.D thesis today. Congratulations and great job Shawna!!
I am teaching my genomics & bioinformatics (graduate) course this spring. It has gone well in past years and was popular with students.
Our first paper on Red Junglefowl captive population genetics has been published in the Journal PeerJ. This resulted from great work by former postdoc Charlotte Hieke and undergraduate researcher Nikolas Faust. Check it out here: Effective Population Sizes and Adaptive Genetic Variation in a Captive Bird Population.
Several lab members turned out to help capture, band, and bleed the new cohort of captive Junglefowl that were born here at TAMU. It was the first experience with capturing and bleeding birds for our two newest undergraduate researchers Reina Hingoranee and Younghee (Grace) Jeon. Monitoring the genetics of these populations regularly helps us understand how parentage and the mating system works in Junglefowl, as well as inform our investigations of long term trends in small populations. The DNA from the…
Jamie Alfieri (re)joined the lab as a Ph.D Student in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Program. Jamie will be working on the genomics of avian hybridization. Welcome back Jamie!
Our manuscript looking focusing on microbiota acquisition under different photoperiods is now under review at PeerJ and is also published as a preprint. Check it out here: Circadian disruption and divergent microbiota acquisition under extended photoperiods in chicken
Our manuscript looking at genetic diversity and effective population sizes in a captive Red Junglefowl population is now published as a preprint while it is under peer review. Kudos to undergrad researcher Nic Faust who worked on generating some of the data in this manuscript. Check out the paper here: Effective population sizes and adaptive genetic variation in a captive bird population
