July 2012
Undergraduate Honor’s student Lucy Packard graduates Magna cum Laude. Heartiest congratulations, Lucy!
April 2012
Ph.D. student Lijing Bu was accepted into the 2012 summer internship program offered by New Mexico INBRE (IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence)/National Center for Genomic Resources (NCGR). Congratulations Lijing!
Undergraduate Honor’s student Lucille Packard got accepted into the UNM Department of Biology’s graduate program and will be starting her Master’s thesis in the lab in Fall 2012. Welcome again, Lucy!!!
Congratulations to Jieying Yang on graduating with her Master’s!!!
November 2011
Two recent accolades for undergraduate research assistant Matthew Solomon this month. He has been elected a Ronald P. McNair scholar and has been accepted into the Undergraduate Honor’s thesis program. Way to go, Matt!!!
Vaishali gave an invited talk to the general public titled “The Case for Evolution” on November 16th, 2011 as part of the Albuquerque Academy High School’s Community Lecture Series. On November 18th, 2011, she presented “The Case for Evolution” to the student body at the Albuquerque Academy (grades 10-12, 8-9 and 6-7).
September 2011
Our latest paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology evaluates the rate of sequence asymmetry in gene duplicates pairs in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae originating from both small-scale duplications (SSD) and whole-genome duplication (WGD). We demonstrate that, on average, the derived copy in SSD pairs does evolve at an accelerated pace relative to the ancestral paralog. In addition, faster-evolving copies for both SSD and WGD pairs have lowered codon usage and expression levels.
Congratulations to Ph.D. student Lijing Bu for his first publication from the lab!!!
August 2011
Undergraduate researchers Lucy Packard and Matt Solomon won scholarships from the UNM Parent Association. Congratulations to both!
April 2011
Undergraduate research assistant Kayleigh Stogsdill won the Thelma Evans Scholarship from the UNM Biology Department.
Undergraduate research assistant Matthew Solomon won the ML Hughes Scholarship from the UNM Biology Department.
Heartiest congratulations to both!
February 2011
Our latest Current Biology paper in collaboration with the Bergthorsson lab provides the first empirical estimate of the spontaneous gene duplication rate in a multicellular eukaryote. This rate of 10^-7 duplications per gene per generation in Caenorhabditis elegans is quite high, and exceeds the point mutation rate by two orders of magnitude, and is likely a conservative underestimate.
January 2011
Hallie Rane has joined the Bergthorsson-Katju labs as a Research Lab. Tech.
A warm welcome to Kandis Wright and Matthew Solomon who have joined our lab as undergraduate research assistants.
December 2010
Undergraduate Honor’s student Hallie Rane graduates Summa cum Laude. Heartiest congratulations, Hallie!
Our review paper on the genomic and population-genetic effects of gene conversion on the evolution of gene duplicates in Caenorhabditis genomes was published online in a special issue of Genes. (Abstract)
September 2010
A warm welcome to Aarti Attreya who recently joined our lab as an undergraduate research assistant.
August 2010
A warm welcome to new graduate students Clare Steinberg and Jieying Yang who recently joined our lab for a Ph.D. and Master’s degree, respectively.
A warm welcome to Kayleigh Stogsdill who recently joined our lab as an undergraduate research assistant.
Undergraduate student Lucille Packard has commenced with her Senior Honors Thesis in Fall 2010.
June 2010
In a new paper published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, we determine the origin of fog-2, a unique gene thought to have conferred hermaphroditism in C. elegans. We conduct a comprehensive population-genetic study across C. elegans wild isolates to elucidate the extent of concerted evolution via gene conversion between fog-2 and its paralog ftr-1 and the consequences for intraspecific polymorphism. Gene conversion contributes significantly to DNA sequence variation in the wild, as was observed in experimentally evolved populations. We hypothesize that the fog-2 gene arose 46 million generations ago, well within the time-frame predicted for the evolution of hermaphroditism in this species. (Abstract)
May 2010
Undergraduate Honor’s student Hallie Rane has won the “Superior Undergraduate” award from UNM’s Sigma Xi Chapter. Heartiest congratulations, Hallie!
April 2010
A warm welcome to Cole Wolf who recently joined our lab as an undergraduate research assistant.
Undergraduate Honor’s student Hallie Rane won, not one, but two coveted undergraduate scholarships from the UNM Biology Department, namely the Biology Scholarship for Excellence in Research and the Maurice Hughes Scholarship for Excellence in Research. Go Hallie! You do us proud!
January 2010
A warm welcome to McNair/ROP scholar Oscar Luis Maldonado who has just joined our lab and plans to further pursue a Senior Honor’s Thesis.
We received NSF funding for our collaborative research with Ulfar Bergthorsson (PI) on duplication/deletion rates in experimentally evolved C. elegans lines.
November 2009
Excellent news from NSF - details to follow. Stay tuned!
A warm welcome to Lucille Packard and Benjamin Stanley who recently joined the lab group as undergraduate research assistants.
August 2009
Undergraduate student Hallie Rane has commenced with her individual Senior Honors Thesis in Fall 2009.
A warm welcome to Ph.D. student Lijing Bu who joined us from China in Fall 2009.
July 2009
In a new paper in Genome Biology, we demonstrate differences in the structural and genomic attributes of gene duplicates in the yeast genome relative to that of worm, arguing that both differential mechanisms of gene duplication and selective regimes are responsible for this interspecific variation. (Abstract)
Archived News
Copyright 2012 V. Katju