2023
December
Lotterhos Lab Awards
Every year we have an awards ceremony. This year the winners are:
Remy - Thrifty Award
Brandon and Sarit - Conceptually Challenging Project Award
Madeline - Collaboration Award
Camille - Mentoring Award
Nicole - Protocol Development (and DJ) award
Kiran - Sample Sleuth Award
Elisabeth - Complex Analysis Award
Zea - "Nobody Cares Work Harder" (and DJ) Award
Annabelle - Grant Writing Award
Fin - Scientific Illustration Award
and the lab gave Katie "Next level efficiency Award"
Elisabeth Leung defends Honors Thesis
Undergrad Elisabeth Leung defends her Honors Thesis entitled "A comparison of non-invasive genotyping methods for juvenile Eastern oysters". In her research Elisabeth determined that the best way to non-invasively genotype oysters was to relax them with Epsom Salt, sample the edge of the mantle, and store the tissue in 95% pure ethanol.
November
Lab counts 72,000 oysters
And they said it couldn't be done!
Our "model validation program" is evaluating the ability of genomic forecasting models to predict the fitness of oysters when they are moved to a new environment. For a rigorous evaluation, we need accurate data for the survival of different groups of oysters in the field.
Our experiment is monitoring the survival of juvenile oysters created from crosses of parental genotypes from Texas to Maine in the Cheasapeake Bay.
We counted alive and dead oysters from 60 bags. Each bag contained ~1,200 oysters to count.
Bags in the field
Katie collecting the bags
Zea taking salinity
Camille and Madeline
Madeline adding a tag to the bag
Zea tagging oysters
October
Lotterhos lab research featured at Super Computing 23
Check out the virtual booth here: https://sc23.mghpcc.org/project/genome-forecasting/
Last seascape populations are collected and processed!
We processed 1,160 total oysters from 40 sites with help from 10 different lab members (some former and some current). We processed oysters on 53 unique days, with our first population on 5/11/2022 and the last one on 10/11/2023.
Pea Crab Parasite
Madeline finds a pea crab parasite inside of an oyster from Connecticut
Oyster Shucking
Camille shucks open an oyster from our last seascape population
Tissue Biopsy
Zea learns how to biopsy gill, mantle, and gonad tissue and preserve it for genetic analysis
Katie gives a talk on the Evolving Seas Research Coordinated Network to the National Association of Marine Labs
September
Lab photo
Katie gives a Keynote Talk in Stockholm
At the Computational Methods in Evolution and Biodiversity Conference, Katie spoke about how computer simulations can give insight into paradigms and paradoxes in evolutionary biology.
Brandon gives a Keynote talk in Brasov, Romania
At the Evoltree conference, Brandon presented our analysis of genomic offset methods.
Lab presents our research at a joint symposium with the Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute
July and August
SLiM Workshop at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology
Lab members Remy Gatins, Madeline Eppley, Camille Rumberger, and Sarit Truskey attended the SLiM workshop hosted by Dr. Ben Haller.
Green Urchin Collection for Don Levitan
Oysters, oysters, oysters
We continue to process oysters for our Model Validation Program, which is studying whether we can use machine learning models to predict the fitness of oysters in the field.
oyster seed
Nicole
Kiran
Fin
Lab members clockwise from back left: Kiran, Zea, Madeline, Elisabeth, and Camille.
Lab snorkeling
from left: Camille, Madeline, Nicole, Kiran, Remy, and Alice
June
Lerner Gray Award
Graduate Student Madeline Eppley is awarded the Lerner Grey Grant from the American Museum to Natural History to study temporal genomics of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay!
May
Lotterhos Lab spawns oysters collected from Texas to Maine
In May we spawned oysters from Texas to Maine in collaboration with the Aquaculture Genetics & Breeding Technology Center at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Thanks to the amazing team at the hatchery, all of the oysters were ripe and ready to spawn at the same time, which was no small feat!
We will study how well their genetics predicts the survival of their larvae in the hatchery and in the field in the Cheseapeake Bay.
April
Outreach to Lynn Schools
Graduate student Madeline Eppley presented her research to dozens of students from school districts in Lynn this month.
Madeline Eppley receives an Honorable Mention for her NSF-GRFP proposal
Undergraduate Kiran Bijaj receives a "Women in Science" Award from Northeastern and is chosen as a NOAA Hollings Scholar
Lotterhos Lab Undergraduates present their research at RISE
Nicole Mongillo
Kiran Bajaj
Elisabeth Leung
Clara Winguth
March
New study published in PNAS
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2220313120
The paradox of adaptive trait clines with non-clinal patterns in the underlying genes
Population geneticists have historically modeled adaptation in meta-populations to a single environmental gradient, which evolves monotonic clinal patterns in allele frequency at the loci under selection. This study shows that under complex multivariate adaptation, trait clines can evolve despite nonmonotonic allele frequency patterns across environmental gradients. These patterns are not discovered by genotype–environment association methods, which are widely used to discover adaptation. This result challenges widely held conceptual models of adaptation via subtle shifts in allele frequencies across environmental gradients and can explain why genes that underlie environmental traits do not always evolve clines. Additionally, this study shows that even when inference from genotype–environment association methods is inaccurate, multivariate quantitative traits can still be accurately estimated from genotypes and environments.
Oyster Workshop for High Schoolers
Lotterhos lab presents at the 2023 High School Marine Science Symposium. This annual event reaches 200+ high school students and teachers in the Boston Area.
Many thanks to Remy Gatins, Madeline Eppley, Camille Rumberger, Kiran Bajaj, and Nicole Mongillo for designed an awesome and popular oyster workshop! The workshop can be located on the Lotterhos Lab Protocols website here.
Dr. Lotterhos presents at PopSim
Katie gives an overview of our lab's research using simulations at the PopSim workshop at Cold Spring Harbor.
Lab dinner - molé at Remy's
February
Lab Boda Borg
We failed to complete any quests, but we still had fun trying to figure it out!
From left top: Clara, Remy, Kiran, Katie, Madeline, Camille
From left bottom: Nicole, Elisabeth, Sarit
Development and Evaluation of High-Density SNP Arrays for the Eastern Oyster Crassostrea virginica
The Eastern Oyster Breeding Consortium's paper on a high density SNP array for the Eastern oyster is pubished in Marine Biotechnology.
Our oysters are conditioning at the Virginia institute of Marine Science!
We have collected individuals of the Eastern Oyster from across their entire range - from Texas to Maine - and are conditioning them at VIMs for our experiment this summer. We are going to test just how well their genetics predicts the success of their offspring in the field.
January
Welcome our new undergraduate researchers!
The lab is excited to welcome our undergraduate researchers:
Elisabeth Leung - returning to work on her Honors Thesis
Clara Winguth - working on an R Shiny App for understanding multivariate selection for her senior capstone
Nicole Mongillo - 8-month full time co-op
Kiran Bijaj - full time co-op and AJC Merit Scholar