Gavin wins the 2014 Dean’s Mentorship Award from the College of Biological Sciences for his collaborative work with undergraduate and high school students.
Author: akopp Page 4 of 15
Daniel receives the Victoria Finnerty undergraduate travel award from the Genetics Society of America to attend this year’s Drosophila Research Conference. Press release is here. Interestingly, 2 out of 11 award recipients are from the UC Davis EVE department.
Dave Plachetzki has established his new lab at the University of New Hampshire Department of Molecular, Cellular, & Biomedical Sciences, where he’ll be closer to his favorite critters (in the summer, at least; he’ll miss us in winter). Good luck Dave!
Daniel receives Stanford Graduate Fellowship – and is off to the Stanford University Ecology and Evolution graduate program next year. We’ll miss him.
Our first lab mussel-hunting trip to Point Reyes was a success despite heavy surf. We hit the mussel rocks at low tide and were able to collect enormous amounts of big, happy mussels. Our entire lab and numerous allies spent the whole evening cooking and eating them – and still had a bunch left over for later. Lots of work, but it was a very tasty lab outing.
After two years of carving pumpkins, we are doing something more adventurous this fall. Our fall lab outing will be to collect mussels (Mytilus californianus) on Point Reyes in early November (weather and dinoflagellates permitting). Exact date TBD depending on tides and surf conditions. Mussel shells will be collected in the interests of science; soft tissues are surplus to requirements and will be safely disposed of with the help of white wine, garlic and butter. Stay tuned, and think where you can get a wetsuit.
This quarter, our lab meetings are Thursday 12-2 in Spieth Room.
Wine, Cheese, and Bullshit are Fridays 4-5, every other week starting October 4, also in Spieth.
This paper is a detailed examination of the development of feather pigmentation. Very interesting stuff. The only problem is that lots of information is stuffed into a tiny Science paper. I wish they published it in a long-format journal…
Beatriz Vicoso and Doris Bachtrog have a very interesting paper showing that the Drosophila 4th (dot) chromosome is homologous to the sex chromosome of more basally branching Diptera. It seems that, early in Drosophilid evolution, Muller-A took over the role of the sex chromosome from Muller-F. They also have an interesting discussion of how such takeovers could occur.