Emerging from the fog...

A lot has happened in the past 3 years, including a wonderful (half) sabbatical in Europe for Lila & family, a global pandemic suffered and now optimistically set aside, a mind-expanding AGA Presidential Symposium on selfish evolution (thanks to amazing speakers!!), and many monkeyflowers moving through the field, greenhouse, and lab…

Two new PhD students, Evan Stark-Dykema (Fall 2021) and Natalie Dietz (Fall 2022), have joined the lab. Evan is deep into working on centromeric drive, including both field work and analyses of beautiful new de novo genome assemblies of our flagship M. guttatus lines from DOE-JGI. Natalie has caught the non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) bug from the Sala Lab, and is contemplating a dissertation exploring its roles in life history and stress tolerance in Mimulus. Also in the past year, Colette Berg advanced to PhD candidacy (yay Colette!).

Standard deviations... review of mechanisms of distortion published in AR Genetics

A guide to all the ways (not just meiotic drive) that transmission can be non-Mendelian in mapping populations. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-genet-112618-043905

Thanks to co-author Mariah McIntosh for the literature analysis and AMAZING figures!!!!

Congrats to Fishman Lab graduates!!

A fond farewell to Spring 2019 grads Kory Kolis and Brooke Kern!! Kory successfully defended his MS work on the population genetics of Yellowstone monkeyflowers this week and is heading to Idaho for summer field work for his new job. Brooke has completed her bachelor’s degree with Honors research on Mimulus bicolor, and will be joining the PhD program at the University of Minnesota in the Fall.

Colette Berg joins the lab as PhD student

Fresh off completing an MS in Missouri on climate change and phenology in Triodanis, Colette Berg makes the move to Missoula and Mimulus. Welcome Colette!!

New paper in Molecular Ecology Special Issue on structural variation

Led by Thom, we have a new paper out on crazy CNVs of a tRNA ligase gene (1,2,3 and 300 copies!!!!) that affect a slow-fast life-history tradeoff and experience fluctuating selection in wild annual yellow monkeyflowers. Thanks to all who contributed to this roller-coaster of a project!

Mariah wins an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!

Congrats to Mariah McIntosh, who has been an amazing contributor to the lab group over the past 5 years, on this well-earned award!!! Mariah is staying at UM for graduate work, though likely shifting into Restoration Ecology.

When two rights make a wrong... Plant hybrid incompatibility review out!

Our review paper on plant hybrid incompatibilities (co-authored with Andrea Sweigart at UGa) is now out at the Annual Review of Plant Biology.  Thanks to all the Mimulus folks who contributed images and apologies to anyone whose research we didn't have space to cover.

NSF EPSCoR grant on genome-to-phenome connections

The University of Montana (Cheviron, Fishman, Good, et al) and the University of Nebraska (Storz, Montooth, Meiklejohn) just received a large training and research grant through the NSF EPSCoR Track II program focused on genome-to-phenome studies in natural populations. This support will allow us to establish a synergistic training and research network of evolutionary geneticists between these two groups. Research activities of the UNVEIL (Using Natural Variation to Educate, Innovate and Lead) network will center around core projects focused on adaptation to spatiotemporal environmental variation in mammalian and plant systems. There will be opportunities for graduate and postdoctoral support under this project (more announcements on this soon). Please contact Lila if you are interested.

New Evolutionary Genomics Space

In Spring 2017, we joined the Miller, Good, Cheviron, McCutcheon, (and now Cooper) Labs in a new custom-designed space for evolutionary genomics research on the 3rd floor of ISB. At last, work space commensurate with the amazing people and views here!!!!