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
Undergraduate researchers Nik Faust and Morgan Modrzejewski presented a talk and poster, respectively, on the work they have been doing in our lab, at the Texas A&M Student Research Week. SRW is the largest student-run symposium of its kind. Congrats to Nik and Morgan for the hard work that led to the presentations!
Just back from a rather quick trip to the Plant and Animal Genomes conference in San Diego. It was a really good meeting. The poultry workshop had also organized a special session on gene editing, which included talks by people working on a range of applications – all the way from Erich Jarvis (Rockefeller), Helen Sang (Roslin) and Janet Fulton (Hy-Line). A lot of momentum from the academic community towards adopting gene editing tech in livestock genomics. Great news! In…
I recently presented at the Animal Genetics and Disease conference at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge, UK. This was the inaugural meeting of this new conference. The conference featured speakers including Leif Andersson, Sue Lamont, Helen Sang, Peter Parham, and Elaine Ostrander (NIH) among other many amazing speakers. I really liked the small close setting of this conference which was great to meet people. I presented data on new work we’ve been doing on structural genetic variation in the…
On April 4th, Rohit Rohra successfully passed his final evaluation for his PPiB program, and in doing so will receive his M.S. Biotechnology in May 2017. He presented his program portfolio and research experiences to his committee and he was passed unanimously. Congratulations Rohit!
I participated in the Wakonse South Teaching conference held in Burnet, Texas over the weekend of March 31st. Other than being in a gorgeous location and the perfect time to be there, I had my mind blown repeatedly during some of the teaching workshops I attended there. I came back with some ideas to overhaul my own teaching, especially my undergrad genetics course. During the downtime in the conference, I made full use of the opportunity to be out and…
