News
April 2024. Congrats to Will Brooks for being one of the recipients of the School of Systems Biology Community Engagement Award! Will is active in the community by giving talks about his research, leading bird walks, maintaining a GMU bird alert chat group and training other students.
April 2024. Congrats to Paul Delaney for receiving a $5000 research grant from the Washington Biologists Field Club! Project title: Using Metabarcoding to investigate the community composition of the intertidal biofouling community of the Chesapeake Bay.
Feb 2024. Student Spotlight: PhD student Lauren Fuchs received 2023 Grant from the Orianne Society!
The Orianne Society works to conserve imperiled reptiles and amphibians using science, applied conservation and education. Lauren was granted the scholarship for her project: Influence of land use on the snake skin microbiome and potential implications for the host’s primary innate immune defense against ophidiomycosis.
Read about it here: https://www.oriannesociety.org/science-initiative/grant_program/2023-recipients/?v=400b9db48e62
2023 November. Bio News featured Marcus's summer work.
GMU Biology graduate student contributed to
IUCN Red Listing Assessment of an elusive Asian mammal
Marcus Chua (GMU Biology PhD student) was invited to Nui Chua National Park in Vietnam from October 17 to 19 in a unique opportunity to contribute to the conservation of the silver-backed chevrotain—a tiny hoofed mammal that was lost to science for almost 30 years since 1990. This tiny shoebox-sized deer-like creature was only recorded by scientists again in 2018, leading a team of Vietnamese and international experts and partners to convene this meeting to help protect it.
Over three days framed against the backdrop of rugged coast and dry coastal forest, a team of experts took part in an IUCN Red List of Threatened Species assessment for the chevrotain and a symposium on promoting the conservation of the silver-backed chevrotain and Vietnam’s threatened dry coastal forests. Some key outcomes were the proposed listing of the species as internationally Critically Endangered, and the sharing of ideas to protect the chevrotain and its habitat.
Marcus was the only international speaker at the symposium and shared about chevrotain evolution, taxonomy (scientific classification), and new insights on the natural history of the silver-backed chevrotain, findings that are part of his dissertation research advised by Dr. Haw Chuan Lim at GMU. The symposium ended with a field trip to prime silver-backed chevrotain habitat in the national park. Even though no one saw any chevrotains that trip—no scientist has for the last three decades— Marcus left with a rare opportunity to see how conservation in Vietnam works and be able to contribute to a small part of it.
2023 Sep. Will's summer field work is featured in Bio News (Week 5).
Spotlight:
Through hardships and monkey antics, PhD student Will Brooks conducts fieldwork in Malaysian Borneo
Will Brooks (Lim Lab) traveled to Malaysian Borneo to conduct field work for his PhD dissertation research at George Mason University. Borneo holds hyper-species-diverse tropical rainforests which are imperiled by deforestation. In tropical rainforests, some species will experience population declines in response to forest fragmentation. Will aims to find which bird species are negatively impacted by forest fragmentation in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo and explore mechanisms explaining their sensitivity. He used automatic recording devices to document species presence in fragments and captured birds to gather body measurements and samples for DNA analysis.
This summer, Brooks worked in forest fragments in an oil palm plantation and in primary rainforest in Maliau Basin, a circular geological feature known as “Sabah’s lost world.” The first field season of the project was a great success. Brooks and his four research assistants were able to collect 640 hours of audio recordings and hundreds of blood and fecal samples. This data was hard earned. The travel logistics and permit bureaucracy were stressful, and extreme heat and humidity made field work physically exhausting. An unexpected local holiday closed multiple permitting offices, delaying field work by an entire week. Then in the first round of data collection, one fourth of the audio recorders were stolen or destroyed by monkeys. Super glue, rope, and mud was all that was needed to secure the recorders; no others were stolen during the rest of the season. With unexpected obstacles also came some lovely surprises. Will and his research assistants were treated to a rare mass fruiting event at Maliau Basin, which drew in rare species including the Helmeted Hornbill, the Crested Partridge, and the Bulwer’s Pheasant.
2023 Jul. Exciting student authored papers on bee gut microbiome and parasites out in Journal of Invertebrate Pathology and PeerJ.
David Lambrecht, a former MS student, published results from his thesis research in the paper "Minimal sharing of nosematid and trypanosomatid parasites between honey bees and other bees, but extensive sharing of Crithidia between bumble and mason bees".
Navolle Amiri (undergrad student) and Mia Keady (former MS student) are co-first authors of the paper "Honey bees and bumble bees occupying the same landscape have distinct gut microbiomes and amplicon sequence variant-level responses to infections".
2023 May. Congratulations to Lim lab members for being recognized by the Department for excellent teaching! Lauren received the Outstanding Biology Graduate Student Teacher Award and Tom received the Innovative Teaching Award.
2023 Apr. Happy to publish this on the enigmatic and diminutive Oriental Dwarf Kingfisher with Shakya and colleagues. Gratifying to find that the conclusion from my paper > 10 yrs ago using 1/1000 fewer loci that plumage polymorphism is caused by ancient hybridization stands.
2023 Apr. Former undergrad researcher Navolle Amiri talks about her experience of conducting microbiome research in the lab.
2023 Mar. GMU's Honey Bee Initiative featured by National Science Teacher TV. Features various aspects of the initiative, such as smarthive, forensic science, DNA barcoding and virtual reality field trip.
2022 Aug. Cutest addition to Karen's conservation center - Tillie.
2022 Aug. Few more pieces of equipment and the aDNA lab is ready for action!
2022 Aug. Lauren living dangerously by taking skin swabs to quantify Oo fungal spores and skin microbiomes.
2022 Jul. Wonderful to be back working in the field in Sarawak, Malaysia after a long hiatus.
2022 Mar. Congrats to former MS student, Jon Clark, for publishing work from his MS research in the journal Evolution, with his study species making the cover!
2022 Jan. Congrats to Mia Keady (former MS student, now a PhD student at U Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies). She published her MS thesis on elephant microbiome in the Animal Microbiome journal.
2021 Dec. Congrats to Research Semester student Toqa Elashry for successfully presenting her poster "CAN PLANTS BE IDENTIFIED BY THE COLOR OF THEIR POLLEN?" during last week's Annual Celebration of Biology Undergrad Research. She did a great job quantifying colors of 2600+ pollen pellets. The next step is to match color groups to DNA barcode in order to identify plant species.
2021 Jul. New paper out that provides important insights into genetic diversity and structure of two endangered Hawaiian honeycreeper species.
2021 Mar. Research on tiny packets! Undergrad student researchers Quentin (supported by OSCAR URSP and co-supervised Dr Hanley) and Michelle work on quantifying colors of pollen pellets carried by honey bees. They then match colors of pellets to species IDs generated by sequencing of plant barcoding genes (ITS, rbcL and matK). We hope to develop a rapid method that can let beekeepers know what plant resources their hives are using. Their work is featured by GMU's Honey Bee initiative.
2020 Nov. Bird10K major paper (363 genomes) is out in Nature journal. Here are some press coverage.
2020 Nov. Congrats to Morgan for publishing her master's thesis in Frontiers in Microbiology on red wolf gut microbiome!
2020 Oct. Paper on Borneo treeshrews out. Led by GMU PhD student Lilly Park and alum (now NMNH curator) Missy Hawkins.
First lab meeting of Fall 2020. Crazy how the new normal is.
2020 May. Congratulations to David Lambrecht and Mia Keady for successfully defending their master's theses, while the covid-19 pandemic is going on. David worked on bee parasites and viral pathogens while Mia worked on the correlation between gut microbiome and reproductive health of captive elephants. To the right is a screenshot of David's defense held on Webex.
2020 March. Goodbye physical office and lab space for the next few months. We are hunkering down to finish theses, work on grant proposals, analyze data, write papers, hang out with family members until the covid19 pandemic is over. So long! (PS picture of my home office where most work happens now).
2020 March. Here's a new paper in Ecology and Evolution on using old DNA from bird museum specimens and next-gen sequencing to generate huge amounts of data to study phylogeographic patterns in SE Asia, a poorly understood but hyperdiverse part of the world. With advanced lab techniques and bioinformatics tools, we could decipher patterns and processes that used to be inaccessible. It's accompanied by a blog post as well.
2019 December. Congrats to Navolle and Mia who presented their posters at the Undergraduate Research Semester poster session and the Fall 2019 SSB Student Research Day, respectively.
2019 October. Folks from the Patriot Pollinator Coalition visited the lab to learn about our pollinator-related research. We are thankful for their support!
2019 September. Monica attending the NYC RAD-camp to learn techniques associated with restriction-fragment sequencing.
2019 August. Lim lab and friends/families celebrating Jon's successful thesis defense.
2019 August. HC is part of team that received a grant from GMU's Institute for a Sustainable Earth for its inaugural cycle. The funded project is "Empowering Diverse Virginia Communities through the George Mason University Honey Bee Initiative, a Joint Initiative of the School of Business and the College of Science".
2019 August. Congrats to Jon Clark for successfully defending his thesis on Song Sparrow Ecological Speciation (left) and presenting a nice talk at Evolution 2019, Providence RI (right)
2019 June. Congrats to people at the Lim Lab!
Mia received the Smithsonian Summer Fellowship to work with Dr Carly Wolz at the Center for Conservation Genomics, National Zoological Park
Karen received a GMU Summer Research Fellowship and her work on Red Siskin is mentioned on the Red Siskin Initiative June 2019 newsletter.
Jon accepted a PhD fellowship at New Hampshire to study coastal birds!
We thank the Patriot Pollinator Coalition for funding some of our research on bee pathogen.
Our pollinator work is featured by 4VA at Mason (Link) and Dave is working as an intern during the summer at the USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center
2019 April. PhD student Karen Holm with at the SSB Student Research Day. She received an Honorary Mention for her poster on SNP genotyping of captive Red Siskins. https://cos.gmu.edu/ssb/students/student-research-day/
2019 Mar. Mia running her elephant microbiome samples on the Miseq.
2019 March. A new cryptic species of bulbul (Pycnonotus pseudosimplex sp. nov. - A) is described in Borneo. It's called Cream-eyed Bulbul and has long been confused as a variant of Cream-vented Bulbul P. simplex (B) in Borneo.
https://bioone.org/journals/Bulletin-of-the-British-Ornithologists-Club/volume-139/issue-1/bboc.v139i1.2019.a3/A-cryptic-new-species-of-bulbul-from-Borneo/10.25226/bboc.v139i1.2019.a3.full
2019 March. NGS machines funded by COS Instructional Research grant are coming in gradually.
2019 Mar. Mia collecting elephant poop from NZP for her microbiome study.
2019 Mar. 96-well magnetic particle separator made from 3D printed plastic
2019 March. Karen and her conservation center are featured in Charlottesville Inside Out (WVPT)
2019 Jan. Lim Lab meeting. Monica is not in the picture.
2019 Jan. Congrats to Jon for receiving the Catherine and Richard Becker Fellowship for ESP Master’s students! A bunch of us also received a $160K Instructional Research Equipment grant to buy some instruments.
Views from Colgan Hall
Dave, Amanda (OSCAR undergrad) and Mitra setting up a production line to remove pollen & sterilize bees before their DNA are extracted
2018 Oct. Three members of the EvoGenomics lab (Karen, Jon - participants; HC - instructor for population genomics segments) are at the SMSC Conservation Genomics course.
Thanks to the MIX@Fenwick, we 3D printed gel combs for our large gel rig, saving hundreds of $!
Quentin Jamison joins our lab as an undergrad (sophomore, Biology major) volunteer. He is mentored by Marcus and works on 3RAD sequencing and landscape genetics of bulbuls.
2018 July. I got to go back to Malaysian Borneo for an ATBC conference (Kuching, Sarawak) and a field trip with Smithsonian and RIMBA people (Sarawak Planted Forest Zone).
2018 July. Congrats to Jon, who received a grant from the Virginia Society of Ornithology for his song sparrow contact zone project.
2018 June. Dr Karen Holm (D.M.V.) is an incoming PhD student working on conservation genomics of Eastern Mountain Bongo (Tragelaphus eurycerus). The wildlife center she helps run welcomed a baby bongo recently!
2018 April. Congratulations to GMU OSCAR URSP (Undergraduate Research Scholars Program) student - Mitra Kashani (co-advised with Dr Forkner) for winning an award at the 2018 COS Research Colloquium! She won the Overall Research Excellence Award in Life Sciences. Her research was on Nosema prevalence in bumble bee queens.
2018 Feb. Collaborative microbiome study on goose GI tract is out!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21892-y
2018 Feb. The lab is getting better equipped, including getting bioruptor pico for sonication,
2018 Jan. Students getting started on bee pathogen projects. Left - Dave (MS student) and Mitra (OSCAR undergrad) getting bees from a GMU teaching apiary with the help of Dr German Perilla. Right - Taking training on bee dissection from Dr Forkner.
2018 Jan. Jacob and Christina of NMNH recently completed a successful expedition to Batang Ai National Park in Sarawak, Borneo. Link.
2017 Dec. Together with Rebecca Forkner (GMU), T'ai Roulston (UVA-Blandy Research Farm), we received $20K to fund a project entitled "High-throughput bee pathogen survey: Combining expertise in pollinator biology, bioinformatics and genomics to yield insight into pollinator health".