Hello friends, and happy Thursday! It's the third week of the Fall semester at Penn State. We've had two home football games, and a third will happen this weekend. Labs and departments are still throwing welcome back parties. The leaves are just starting to turn, the humidity has slightly decreased, and the new undergrads have learned that it is perfectly acceptable to go to early classes in your pajamas.
We also have a couple new grad students in the Perry Lab! Every time our number grows and our interests diversify, we like to begin the new academic year with refreshers on each of our projects. Fall 2017's first lab meeting was dedicated to UpGoer 5 descriptions that we put together to describe our work. This year PJ challenged us to introduce our research on just one slide. We're not meeting till next week, but I thought I'd share with you my take on a summary slide (warning - it's a little crowded):
I know it's kind of a lot to look at, so I'm gonna break it down a bit. Each of our slides has our name, year, department, and photo, plus a timer to keep our lab meeting rolling. Then I have my dissertation title in green, and an alternate title I used during a seminar talk I gave a few weeks ago. Massive shoutout to Christina Bergey for coming up with the alliterative title :)
I highlighted my three study species, and how they each fit into the approach that I've been working with to quantify morphological and genomic evolution in response to human behaviors. Ideally I'd have studied one species with my entire approach, I'd flow from one text block along the arrows to the next, but research science is glorious and messy and plans change literally every day.
I shared a photo of each species, a white "cave painting" from my review article to depict the human behavior at play, and a figure of some cool results that relate to the approach text.
I've talked about my lemur work quite a bit already, so I encourage you to check out those blog posts. Essentially, humans tend to hunt larger animals, and I attempted to see if this were true for Verreaux's sifakas. |
I've mentioned my conch project previously as well. I'll catch you up a bit: I went to Panama to meet the lovely people at STRI and snorkel for West Indian fighting conch. Humans have been harvesting the conch in this area for thousands of years, and there is evidence of size-selective evolution in this species. I wanted to take a look at the DNA of these guys to see what SNPs might have been selected for over time, but I first had to figure out how to get the DNA out of the shells that were left behind. I presented a poster on this work at the Evolution conference in France last year. Long story short, it looks like the method I developed will work for shells <2,000 years old. The really old shells (5,000-7,000 years) were probably exposed to the sun and heat for too long for the DNA inside to have survived intact enough to be analyzed. I'm currently cleaning up this data, and I can't wait to share the final results with you soon! |
I recently shared my Evolution conference poster from this year, which has some VERY PRELIMINARY findings from my lizard project. Humans introduced fire ants to the US in the early 1900s, and they've been preying on lizards ever since. I'm now comparing the DNA of lizard populations from invaded and uninvaded sites across the southeastern US, and will be back with more findings soon. |
As of this moment lizard things are looking pretty exciting, but that also scares me a little bit haha. We'll see where all of this goes!
Some of my lab mates might want to share their one-slide summaries as well. I'll post a follow-up in a few weeks if that's the case. In the mean time, I'm gonna get back to work! The end is near for my graduate student life, and this last academic year is shaping up to be pretty awesome :D I hope you'll come along for the ride! Cheers, and have a lovely weekend.