2021
December 2021
Alan defends his PhD!
"DNA methylation as an intra- and transgenerational mediator of phenotypic response: insights from theory and experimental exposures in Crassostrea virginica under ocean acidification."
Alan's research has shown that although subtle shifts in DNA methylation in oysters are induced by ocean acidification, methylation explains a higher % of variance in larvae growth than additive genetic variance. See Alan's roadmap below.
Dr. Downey-Wall is headed to a prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Waxman Lab for Epigenetics and Molecular Toxicology at Boston University.
Lotterhos Lab Awards!
Every year we have an award ceremony to celebrate Lotterhos Lab acheivements. This year we also had some new categories. Congratulations to everyone for all their hard work:
Madeline - Mentoring Award
Thais - “I fixed a bug in the sequencing facility’s code” Award
Remy - “I leveraged funding to get more funding” Award
Sara - Awesome Graphic Award
Alan - Creative Analysis Award
Sara and Angeline - Web Plot Digitizing Award
Andy and Genese - Virtual Lab Meeting Award
zLotterhos lab awards 2021.pdfNovember 2021
Sara Schaal defends her PhD entitled:
"Understanding how and why intraspecific diversity arises: An interdisciplinary approach combining empirical field studies, theoretical simulations, and historical reconstructions".
This PhD has it all: fish morphology, otolith data, next generation sequencing, bioinformatics, multivariate statistics, remote field work, isotope data, micromilling, archeological digs, and mathematical modeling!
Congratulations Dr. Schaal!
October 2021
Lotterhos Lab Welcomes Genece Grisby (undergrad, UC Davis) and Andy Lee (graduate student, Purdue) as Virtual Lab Meeting Mentees
As part of the Research Coordinated Network for Evolution in Changing Seas, we are participating in the Virtual Lab Training Program. This program helps mentees develop a supportive network, provides a pathway for mentees to future success, and broadens their knowledge in our field.
October 2021
High school interns Angeline Pojoy and Sarah Wagner join the lab! Angeline and Sarah took our "Learn to Code" workshop for high school girls last summer, and we're super excited to have them do virtual internships with the lab. They will be helping Madeline conduct a literature review and extract data from papers on diseases in the Eastern Oyster.
Our collaborative study on "Ocean acidification alters the diversity and structure of oyster associated microbial communities," authored by Andrea Unzueta-Martínez, is published in Limnology and Oceanography Letters.
August 2021
Our study on "Novel and disappearing climates in the global surface ocean from 1800 to 2100" is published Nature Scientific Reports!
We found that majority of environmental shifts since 1800 were not novel, which is consistent with evidence that marine species have been able to track shifting environments via dispersal. However, between 2000 and 2100 under Representative Concentrations Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 projections, 10–82% of the surface ocean is estimated to experience an extreme degree of global novelty. Additionally, 35–95% of the surface ocean is estimated to experience an extreme degree of global disappearance.
Many thanks to the NOAA Centers for Environmental Information for helping us design this image that summarizes the findings of the study.
Our review on "Fluctuating selection and global change: a synthesis and review on disentangling the roles of climate amplitude, predictability and novelty" is published in the Evolution in Changing Seas Special Feature
In this study we review how indexes of risk based on climate novelty (like the one published by the lab this month) are misleading because they focus on the amplitude, rather than the predictability of environmental fluctuations. The predictability of environmental fluctuations is what selects for phenotypic plasticity.
We also performed a literature survey, which revealed that most experimental studies have focused on the amplitude, rather than the predictability of environmental fluctuations. We propose experimental designs that can tease apart climate fluctuations, predictability, and novelty on organism responses to climate change.
The Lotterhos Lab research on oysters, evolution, and climate change is featured on "Solve it For Kids"
Episode 68
Alan receives a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from Northeastern University!
July 2021
We've been busy this summer! Alan and Sara have both been working on writing up their dissertations. Dylan and I have been organizing the weekly "Learn to Code" summer sessions for high school girls.
Remy Gatins, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, received an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship to study range expansion and deleterious mutation load in Black Sea Bass. She will be starting in the lab this fall. Remy and I got a head start on her postdoc with some Black Sea Bass collections this July.
Chris Nadeau, a Smith Fellow, received an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship to study assisted gene flow using Daphnia as a model species. He will be starting the lab next spring.
"Learn to Code" Summer Sessions
In collaboration with Girls Inc in Lynn, MA, we've been holding a weekly online series for high school girls on learning how to code. Thanks to Dylan, Sara, and Elise for helping with instruction!
Trap collection
We worked with a commercial fisherman in Rhode Island to collect juvenile Black Sea Bass.
Measuring
Although we were targeting juvenile fish, we caught this big male! You can tell it's a male by it's blue sheen and the bump on it's head.
Collecting tissues
We collected tissues for high quality genomic DNA and RNA by carefully cleaning the work area and placing samples in liquid nitrogen. We'll use these tissues to sequence and annotate the genome.
June 2021
Registration is open for our "Learn to Code" Summer Sessions - a series of 6 online workshops for high school girls interested in evolutionary biology, climate change, and marine science and who live the North Shore Boston area. Apply here by June 21!
April 2021
We continue meeting online due to the pandemic. Many of us have started getting vaccinated, which is exciting!
Sara and Molly present their research at the American Society of Naturalists meeting in January 2021
Lotterhos's CAREER Award is funded by NSF. This award aims to evaluate if machine learning can be used to predict adaptation to multivariate environments with a model validation program (MVP), and to develop and disseminate education modules to bring principles of data science into the marine and evolutionary sciences
Sara publishes a paper on Comparative thermal performance among four young-of-the-year temperate reef fish species
Sara is chosen for a Postdoc at NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle! She will start after her defense this year.
Molly moves onto her next postdoc in Molly Wolmack's Lab in Utah State University
Lotterhos is awarded a Fulbright scholarship to visit Tjärnö Marine Lab in Sweden in 2022
Ffion defends the honors thesis "Inter- and intra-specific variation in survival of Littorina spp. marine snails after exposure to hot and cold extremes" and graduates from Northeastern!
Thais returns from her maternity leave with more data wrangling in her future
Alan is working on creating the first simulation model with an epigenetic modulator that captures patterns of co-gradient and counter-gradient variation
Madeline Eppley will be joining our lab in Fall of 2021 as a PhD student. We look forward to welcoming her!
2020 Lotterhos Lab Awards
The pandemic has not got the best of us!
Sara - SLiM modeling Award for her inversion simulations
Alan - Meticulous Lab Work Award for prepping low-quantity larvae samples for bisulfite sequencing
Molly - Blood, Sweat, and Tears Award for her CovGE simulations and manuscript
Ffion - Mixed Modeling Award for the most challenging bias-reducing generalized linear model with contrasts analysis for the Littorina data
Thais - Data Wrangling Award for whipping the oyster salinity data, collected in many different ways, into shape