Tiny Fish Makes Big Splash
Read about Dr. David Etnier’s Snail Darter legacy here:
by armsworth
Alannie-Grace Grant (Kalisz Lab) and Sam Borstein (O’Meara Lab) have been awarded Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants from the National Science Foundation. Congratulations to you both!
Grant’s dissertation research is entitled, “Selection, niche breadth and plant mating system evolution: Are wider niche breadths of selfing species shaped by water limitation?”
Borstein’s dissertation research is called, “Morphological consequences of trophic evolution.”
by armsworth
Brian O’Meara has received an NSF Career Award! “Reducing barriers for comparative methods” has been funded for $738,000 over 5 years. Congratulations Brian – great job!
UPDATE: For more information, please read the Tennessee Today article about the award!
by armsworth
Sam Borstein (O’Meara Lab) is a coauthor on a new article in Science called “A pharyngeal jaw evolutionary innovation facilitated extinction in Lake Victoria cichlids.”
This paper looks at how the pharyngeal jaw apparatus in cichlids, widely considered an evolutionary innovation allowing them to feed on a variety of prey items, doomed piscivorous cichlids when the Nile perch invaded Lake Victoria in the 1950’s. The results suggests that competition in conjunction with predation by the introduced Nile perch drove hundreds of endemic cichlid species to extinction.
Congratulations, Sam!
by armsworth
Brian O’Meara has received an NSF Career Award! “Reducing barriers for comparative methods” has been funded for $738,000 over 5 years. Congratulations Brian – great job!
by armsworth
Brian O’Meara is co-PI on a newly funded, nearly $1 million NSF grant entitled “Collaborative Research: ABI Development: An open infrastructure to disseminate phylogenetic knowledge.” Brian’s part is to make trees with time information more available, and includes funds for a postdoc (~$140K for UT). Congratulations, Brian!
by armsworth
Congratulations to Brian O’Meara and Mike Gilchrist, who were recently awarded a new grant from NSF for “Population genetics-based codon models.” They will be developing new methods of phylogenetic reconstruction using protein coding sequences of DNA. Unlike most work in this area, their methods will be based on evolutionary models that explicitly include the forces of mutation, natural selection and genetic drift. Their work will result in more accurate inferences of the evolutionary relationships between different taxa and, simultaneously, estimates of the strength of natural selection on the coding sequences.
by artsciweb
Research assistant professor Barb Banbury and assistant professor Brian O’Meara recently received funding from the Encyclopedia of Life for creating an R interface to parse information from that site. This can be used to identify phylogenetic trends in amount of content for various groups, highlight taxonomic controversies, and in general make this data far more accessible for researchers. All their code is open source and is being developed in public. More information is available here. The figure above shows coverage of various plant species in different databases on a phylogeny of those plants (Asparagales); blue indicates better coverage.
by artsciweb
Faculty member Brian O’Meara is giving a phyloseminar on March 30 at 2 pm eastern on “Making comparative methods as easy as ABC” based on work by him and postdoc Barb Banbury. A phyloseminar is a seminar delivered online virtually — people around the world can log in to watch and ask questions. For more information, see http://phyloseminar.org/.
Update: The seminar is over. You can see a recording at http://phyloseminar.org/recorded.html and the slides at http://brianomeara.info/.