Congratulations to Jason, who won best poster at the UA Department of Biology Biofest research poster competition. Gets a nice chunk of change for research or meeting travel!
The bee game also made its debut! Was a pretty big hit, lots of people interested in playing and learning how hard it is to fly at high elevations (including some professors!) Now, who didn't wake up this morning and think: "I wonder what it would be like to be a bumble bee?". OK, maybe just me. Nonetheless, now you can find out! As part of our NSF mountain bees grant Broader Impacts, my collaborator Michael Dillon and folks at the U Wyoming Biodiversity Institute (thanks Brian Barber and Kyle Summerfield, especially!) devised "Flight of the Bombus" an especially creative interactive video game that illustrates some of the interesting aspects of insect flight, especially the challenges of flight at altitude. I wrote a small grant to the European Society for Evolutionary Biology and got some additional outreach funds to build a version of the game here. Pretty neat eh! We are not entirely sure where this will go long-term, but we intend to bring it out for various events, take it to local schools etc. A pretty creative endeavor! Go Team! Our collaborator in the Dept, Dr. Janna Fierst, recently purchased a starter kit for the Oxford Nanopore MinION mini-sequencer (the "flash drive" sequencer). She had a flowcell that needed to be used, and we happen to have a bee-nome we want sequenced, so it all worked out! So we'll be collaborating on assembling a new bumble bee genome, put the sample on the sequencer today! This method is great because it can sequence nice long reads and has a super easy library preparation. Once the long reads are done we can then layer on some shotgun sequencing data to increase coverage, correct errors, etc. If this works well, it'll be a game changer for assembling draft genomes. Fingers crossed!
Undergraduate researcher Clare Ols and I have been surveying the University of Alabama Arboretum using bee bowl pan traps for the past 8 months. We have uncovered a remarkable amount of native bee diversity in such a small area. We're currently going through and trying to ID everything, but we're estimating at least 60 species collected thus far.
As the semester starts winding down, we've been having a busy week in the lab. 1) Riley successfully defended her M.S. Thesis!Congrats Riley! Riley did a great job on her defense talk and committee grilling session to finish up her Master's work on "The Influence of Space, Sex, and Temperature on Morphology of the Kudzu Bug, Megacopta cribraria (Hemiptera:Plataspidae), a Rapidly Expanding Invasive Species". Riley will be continuing on to get a PhD with Jennifer Howeth in the department. 2) Jason got a teaching awardJason received a teaching excellence award this week at the UA Honor's Week Graduate Honors Convocation for his teaching work in the Biological Sciences! Congratulations to Jason as well! 3) Meaghan, Jason, and I published a new paper on bumble bee color pattern evolutionMeaghan got her first first-authored post doc paper out, and some more of Jason's PhD work contributed to a follow-up paper on Bombus bifarius color pattern population genomics. We use RNAseq (and some RADseq) SNPs to detect signs of selection and identify a possible player in color pattern polymorphism for one of the B. bifarius lineages B. bifarius nearcticus. Pimsler et al. 2017. Population genomics reveals a candidate gene involved in bumble bee pigmentation. Ecology & Evolution doi:10.1002/ece3.2935 4) I will get to call myself an Associate Professor!Nature just published my short article reviewing a recent paper by Carvell et al. (2017) that evaluated how habitat quality impacted bumble bee colony survival across the generations. Check it out here! Lozier, J. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature21897 (2017).
Carvell, C. et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature21709 (2017). The lab threw me a surprise b-day party yesterday at lab meeting, and made me a cake. A bumble-log! All made with bee themed ingredients like almonds, honey, and bee pollinated berries. They also made me a cool personalized calendar with pictures of our field sites! Very nice! Thanks guys!
Lee Roop wrote up a very nice article about our bumble bee research on AL.com. The article also does a nice job of highlighting all the great opportunities for research here at UA. I believe he is planning on doing similar stories about other Alabama scientists as a regular article series, so keep an eye out! Peter Scott, our recently-graduated grad-student and current postdoc in the Shaffer lab at UCLA, recently dropped me a line to tell me his recent paper in Mesoamerican Herpetology (paper here) was the 100th citation to our Journal of Biogeography paper (co-authored by the illustrious Mike Hickerson) on Sasquatch niche modeling (link). Happy 100 Sasquatch, and thanks Peter!
Clare and Rebecca have finally finished processing and pinning up all of the bees collected in two bee bowl surveys at the UA Arboretum from last October and November! It looks like we've got a bunch of different species but things were dominated by what I'm guessing from some cursory identification work is the Halictid Agapostemon virescens (my non-bumble bee ID skills are not great, but I'm working on it!), a very pretty metallic green bee. We plan to do another set of monthly surveys this spring to see how diversity changes over the year.
Zach Gompert (Utah State) visited UA for the Biological Sciences departmental seminar series last Friday. He gave an excellent, chock-full-o-facts seminar on revealing the genomic consequences of hybridization among species, focusing on his research in Lycaeides butterflies (e.g., this paper). The Lozierlab was excited to spend some time with one of the more productive population geneticists out there, and I think we were all motivated by the visit!
A bit late, but the Lozier lab made a good showing at the fall graduate student poster colloquium at the UA Museum of Natural History at Smith Hall. Left to right: Meaghan, Riley, Jeff, Jason! The hippo is not in the lab. Also not shown is Peter, who is taking the picture, but he did not have a poster because he graduated!
The Lozier and Dillon Labs and our research into local adaptation across montane landscapes will be well represented at the upcoming Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in New Orleans this January!
|
Lozier Lab NewsDispatches from the lab and field! Archives
March 2023
Categories
All
|