A big welcome to the new lab members joining this Fall! Erik Iverson is a PhD student in the EEB program interested in the role of mitochondria and mitonuclear coevolution in sexual signalling, species boundaries, and evolution in general. Jerry Maeda is a rotation student in the CMB program that will be examining how the unusual DUI of mitochondria in bivalves affects molecular evolution in mito- and nuclear-encoded genes. Additionally, Gina Carrion is joing the lab as an undergraduate researcher who will be doing some physiology with mitochondria, whole organisms, and everyhting in between Read more about New lab members!

Just returned from the annual Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting, held this year in Manchester, England. There was a great symposium on mitonuclear interactions that featured some old friends and big names in the field that were new faces to me. I contributed a poster highlighting several recent and ongoing projects in the lab from many undergraduate researchers and collaborators. This was my first SMBE meeting and I'll definitely be looking to go again next year. Also got to explore a Read more about SMBE 2019

We got to sample amphipods from a local spring today! This is in preparation for a new project looking at thermal adaptation in cave organisms. Looking forward to working with some native Texas fauna! Read more about Texas field work

We have a new paper available via Mitochondrion on mitochondrial function in Silene angiosperms with highly unusual mito genomes. Short story is that despite some Silene species having extremely large and fast-evolving mito genomes, their mitochondria seem to function fairly normally. We'll be doing some additional experiments with "normal" Silene Read more about Hot off the press: Mito function in Silene