This has been a very productive summer for the Tollis Lab!
Congratulations, Dr. Simone Gable!
Simone Gable successfully defended her dissertation, entitled “Forest for the Trees: A Genome-Wide Perspective on Reptile Evolution”! Simone is the first PhD student to graduate out of the lab, joining in Fall 2020 and completing her studies in a brisk four years. She will be moving on to Arizona State University to work on the EarthBioGenome Project as a postdoc.
PhD student Vahid Fard passed his comprehensive exam, successfully defending his literature review on cancer evolution.
CR1 Retrotransposon Paper Published
Our paper on CR1 retrotransposon evolution across reptiles with a novel focus on squamates, first-authored by Simone Gable and co-authored with NAU undergrads Jasmine Mendez, Nicholas Bushroe, and Adam Wilson, was published this summer in Genome Biology and Evolution. This was the first look at CR1 diversity and dynamics in reptiles since 2015, and in her dissertation work Simone examined 350 vertebrate genomes and discovered several new-to-science subfamilies of CR1 existed across squamate genomes, and finds supports for an extraordinarily rapid rate of genomic evolution in squamates compared to other reptiles (birds, crocodilians, and turtles).
Evolution 2024 (Montreal, Canada)
Two Tollis Lab talks were featured at the Evolution Meeting in Montreal, Canada!
The first was given by Sophie Matthews, a PhD student from the University of Galway who visited our lab in Fall 2023 to study gene duplications and cancer prevalence across mammals. She spoke about her project which we hope to publish soon. Sophie’s talk was selected to be featured in the Cancer Evolution Across Scales symposium.
Followed by Simone Gable in the Systematics II symposium, who spoke about her dissertation research on squamate phylogenomics.