Dr. Marc Halfon at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York visited Miami and gave the departmental seminar “Repeal, replace, and redeploy: evolution of a conserved gene regulatory network in the mosquito Aedes aegypti“.
We had a lot of good discussions about how to improve our enhancer prediction methods. Thanks, Marc for a very intriguing seminar!
Maddy, Jake, and Sean presented their projects at the 2018 Undergraduate Research Forum!
And here are the pictures of Grad student mentor/undergrad researcher duos!
Yoshi attended the 1st AsiaEvo conference that was held in Shenzhen, China. This was the first Asia-wide evolutionary biology conference. The conference was amazing; close to 1,000 attendees and many interesting presentations. Yoshi gave a talk in the session “The developmental origin of novel complex traits”.
We also had a tour to the China National GeneBank, which was an amazing facility!
Our research was featured in the NY Times!
Thanks, Asher Elbein for the great coverage! You can read the article from here.
Also, here is another nice article on the WIRE, which mentions our research. A very comprehensive article covering various aspects of insects and insect wings. We highly recommend it!
“A Bug’s World: the Story of How Wings Set Insects Free to Colonise Earth“
Our paper on establishing enhancer studies in beetles is now published in Development! Hope the approach and recourses we established will help facilitate more enhancer studies in non-Drosophila insects :-)
We made all of our FAIRE data available (NCBI GEO link here), so you can take a look at your genes and hunt for your enhancers. The piggyBac reporter plasmids reported in the paper are now also showcased in this page. More new constructs coming soon!
This work was not possible without the help of the awesome collaborators, Marc Halfon (University at Buffalo), Dan McKay (UNC Chapel Hill), Ezzat El-Sherif (Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät), as well as the dedicated work of Yi-Ting and other members!
Our mini-review recapping the insect wing origin debate and featuring a recent cool paper from Mann and Estella labs is now published on Current Biology.
“Sometime in the Devonian, perhaps about 400 million years ago, insects became the first clade to conquer the sky. Recent evo-devo studies have begun to unravel the mysterious origin of the flight structure that made insects into extraordinary six-legged fliers.”
Hope this will be a good primer when you want to learn how six legged flying buggers have evolved! link
Our work has been featured on some science news outlets. Here are some links!
Growing wings on beetle abdomens provides another clue in the mystery of where insect wings come from. The VERGE
Image of the Day: Ectopic Wings. The Scientist
The origin of insect wings has been revealed by gene editing. New Scientist
Also, here is the behind-the-paper story written by David. Very fun to read. Highly recommend!
Can a beetle with 12 extra wings help explore the evolutionary origin of insect wings? Nature ecology & evolution Community
2018 is off to a great start! Our latest paper on the evolutionary origin of insect wings is now published in PNAS (self-archived version here, and SI from here). By studying wing related tissues in the abdomen of beetles, we obtained further evidence supporting a dual evolutionary origin of insect wings. Hope you like it!
End-of-the-semester lab gathering!
Courtney, Kevin, and Kangxu presented their works at 2017 Miami University Graduate Research Forum. Lots of good research going on at Miami!
