LOZIER MOLECULAR ECOLOGY LAB

We are happy to welcome Kelton Verble as a new PhD student into the lab. Kelton comes to us most directly from the National Genomic Center for Wildlife and Fish Conservation in Missoula MT where he has been cranking out Illumina libraries for wolf population genomics. Prior to that Kelton got his MS at Virginia Tech where he worked on population genetics of African mongooses (mongeese? mongoosi?).

Kelton will be working on the NSF Understanding the Rules of Life mountain bees epigenetics project. He will be looking at how methylation and gene expression patterns in bumble bees from different populations change following cold exposure. Welcome aboard!

I haven't updated the news page in a while (thanks Coronavirus) but lots of stuff still going on here in the Lozier lab. Congrats to everyone!
1) Sam Heraghty published his first first author paper in G3 and also received Honorable Mention on his National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship proposal. 
2) PhD student Jamie Bucholz was awarded a three year fellowship from the Southern Regional Education Board. Jamie was awarded this competitive fellowship which will fund almost all of her stipend for the next three years! Congratulations Jamie!
3) Meaghan's got a job! Meaghan applied and was awarded a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship. She will be leaving us at the end of August for the DC swamp where she will hopefully make a useful contribution to society! There's still lots of data from her postdoc that we have to work on, I don't know what we'll do without her after so long!!

Phd student Sam Heraghty published his first main dissertation paper (before he even took quals, good job!). This is a set of new genome assemblies for Bombus vosnesenskii, Bombus bifarius, and our recently redescribed B. vancouverensis nearcticus (genomes for B. vancouverensis vancouverensis forthcoming). These genomes were assembled from a combination of long read Oxford Nanopore data and high coverage shotgun Illumina data and they came together pretty well. Still not full chromosomes, but with some fairly low cost and personnel time, they compare favorably with other published Bombus and will be of great use for our Understanding Rules of Life epigenetics project.

The paper can be found in G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics at  doi.org/10.1534/g3.120.401437