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

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.

September

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

Green Urchin Collection for Don Levitan

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

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

March

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.

Dr. Lotterhos presents at PopSim

Lab dinner - molé at Remy's

February

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