Pet lovers seeking a better understanding of their four-footed friends might benefit from a new genetic test for sociability in dogs. While studying the genomes of canines Bridgett vonHoldy, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and her colleagues discovered genes in domestic dogs that are similar to those linked to hyper…
I spent my summer as a research assistant for Professor Stoddard in the Stoddard lab researching hummingbird color vision at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in the Colorado Rockies. Part of my responsibilities included taking spectrophotometer measurements of flowers frequently visited by hummingbirds, as well as filming the…
Undergraduate Jack Corso '19 works in Steve Pacala's lab at Princeton. This summer he spent his time in La Jolla, California learning the intricacies of the coral reef photomosaic methodology. Corso also traveled to the French Polynesian island of Moorea, located in the Society Island Archipelago. While on Moorea he stayed and worked out of the…
Undergraduate Lindsay Martinez spent her summer working on her senior thesis project at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya. She is looking at the parasitization of plains zebras and the endangered Grevy’s zebras by a gastrointestinal parasite called a strongyle. To study the intensity of infection with strongyles she opportunistically collected…
Graduate student Ciro Cabal is trying to understand the ecosystem dynamics of the shrubland biomes, and concretely some endogenous and exogenous causes of its existence and physiognomy. Among the endogenous causes, I am interested in disentangling the role of the optimization of individual reproduction allocation in woody plants, developing…
PhD student Ian Miller spent part of his summer outside of Crested Butte, Colorado, studying wild flax and its fungal rust pathogen. The flax-rust system is the classic "gene-for-gene" system, in which pathogens evolve "virulence alleles" that allow them to infect hosts that have evolved "resistance alleles." The ability to infect hosts is…
An essay by Alexandra DeCandia, Andy Dobson, and Bridgett vonHoldt argues for more widespread adoption of diverse molecular methods – examining host and parasite genetics, epigenetics, and microbiome – in studies of wildlife disease. They review insights gained from these analyses in recent years (predominantly focusing on chytridiomycosis in…
