Itzel recently presented at the Cultivamos Excelencia Research Symposium for transfer students at UC Santa Cruz. She presented on work studying genetic mechanisms underlying mammalian hibernation. Congratulations on a great presentation Itzel!
Anne gave a talk at The Wildlife Society’s Annual Meeting in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho this week! Anne presented findings from her rotation project on comparative transcriptomics of hibernation in mammals in the Genomics Special Session.
Congratulations Anne!
Undergraduate researchers Abby and Grace presented research posters at the 2024 Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (SURCA) at Washington State University!
Abby presented work on sex-specific gene expression in hibernating bears and Grace presented work on mitochondrial genomes and population genomics of brown bears.
Congratulations to Abby and Grace!
Tait was awarded the Best Graduate Talk in Population and Organismal Biology at the Western Society of Naturalists annual meeting in Monterey, CA! She presented on her thesis project looking at the regulatory underpinnings of seasonal run-time variation in Chinook salmon.
Congratulations Tait!
The Kelley Lab is excited to welcome Tina Cai to the lab! Tina will be pursuing her PhD in the lab studying adaptation in polar fishes!
The Kelley and Cornejo Labs enjoyed a festive evening of pumpkin carving this past Tuesday. We were joined by Evan, Tina, Sam, MC, Joanna, Omar as well as partners and family for dinner before transforming pumpkins into cats, unicorns, nucleotides, and more!
This week, MC, Isabel, and Kara performed the first DNA extraction in the new Kelley Lab space at UC Santa Cruz!
Thanks to everyone for working to get our new space up and running!
Our recent manuscript was chosen to be featured on the cover of the October 2023 issue of Physiological Genomics! Many thanks to Stephen Graepel for creating this beautiful illustration, and congratulations to Blair, Joanna, all co-authors!
Perry, B.W., A. McDonald, S. Trojahn, M.W. Saxton, E.P. Vincent, C. Lowry, B.D. Evans Hutzenbiler, O.E. Cornejo, C.T. Robbins, H.T. Jansen, and J.L. Kelley. 2023. Feeding during hibernation shifts gene expression towards active season levels in brown bears (Ursus arctos). Physiological Genomics. https://doi.org/10.1152/physiolgenomics.00030.2023
We are excited to welcome three new members of the Kelley Lab at UCSC!
Muh-Ching (MC) Yee is our new lab manager, Isabel Kline is our new lab technician, and Sam Bogan joins as a new postdoctoral researcher in the lab.
Welcome MC, Isabel, and Sam!
Kara’s first lead-author paper is out now in Molecular Ecology! Huge congrats to Kara and coauthors!
Link to the open-access study in Molecular Ecology.
Hydrogen sulfide is a toxic gas that disrupts numerous biological processes, including energy production in the mitochondria, yet fish in the Poecilia mexicana species complex have independently evolved sulfide tolerance several times. Despite clear evidence for convergence at the phenotypic level in these fishes, it is unclear if the repeated evolution of hydrogen sulfide tolerance is the result of similar genomic changes. To address this gap, we used a targeted capture approach to sequence genes associated with sulfide processes and toxicity from five sulfidic and five nonsulfidic populations in the species complex. By comparing sequence variation in candidate genes to a reference set, we identified similar population structure and differentiation, suggesting that patterns of variation in most genes associated with sulfide processes and toxicity are due to demographic history and not selection. But the presence of tree discordance for a subset of genes suggests that several loci are evolving divergently between ecotypes. We identified two differentiation outlier genes that are associated with sulfide detoxification in the mitochondria that have signatures of selection in all five sulfidic populations. Further investigation into these regions identified long, shared haplotypes among sulfidic populations. Together, these results reveal that selection on standing genetic variation in putatively adaptive genes may be driving phenotypic convergence in this species complex.