MVIF talk by Richard Wolff wins best talk prize!
Richard Wolff recently presented his paper at the Microbiome Virtual International Forum and received an award for best talk in his session!
See the talk here:
Pervasive selective sweeps across human gut microbiomes
Richard Wolff and I are delighted to share our latest preprint entitled “Pervasive selective sweeps across human gut microbiomes.” Please check out our paper and our animation featuring the paper below!
Mariana Harris wins the DeLill Nasser Travel Award!
We are so proud of Mariana Harris for winning the DeLill Nasser Award! She will be attending PEQG this Spring with the award to present her work on the prevalence of hard versus soft sweeps on the X chromosome of Drosophila.
See her publications in Genetics (2024) and MBE (2023)!
Michael Wasney wins the Goodman Luskin UCLA seed fellowship!
We are incredibly proud of doctoral student Michael Wasney for winning the inaugural UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center seed fellowship!
Inference of the demographic histories and selective effects of human gut commensal microbiota over the course of human history
We are delighted to share our latest preprint on “Inference of the demographic histories and selective effects of human gut commensal microbiota over the course of human history“. Please check out our paper and below is an animation we made sharing a few highlights from the paper!
Congrats to Mariana for Best Poster Award and Jon for a great Talk!
Congratulations to Mariana Harris for winning Best Poster Award at the UCLA QCBio retreat on her work on hard sweep enrichment on the X chromosomes of Drosophila melanogaster! Additionally, congratulations to Jonathan Mah for delivering a fantastic talk at the retreat on his work on demographic inference of gut commensal microbes!
NIH R35 award
We are extremely grateful to the NIH for awarding our lab an R35 grant. We will be working on furthering our understanding the evolutionary dynamics of gut bacteria during gut colonization. Stay tuned for results on this work!
Enrichment of hard sweeps on the X in six Drosophila species
Lead by Mariana Harris and in collaboration with Bernard Kim, we recently posted a preprint showing that hard sweeps are enriched on the X chromosome of six Drosophila species, generalizing findings that we previously made in a single population of D. melanogaster.
Please check out our video on the paper!
Welcome BIG summer students!
We are thrilled to welcome Jooeun Jeon, Radha Ganesh, and Rahul Natarajan this summer to our lab for the Bruins in Genomics summer program!
Radha Ganesh
Jooeun Jeon
Rahul Natarajan
Leah Briscoe defends her PhD!
Our first PhD student, Leah Briscoe, defended her PhD this past month! Leah’s work spanned several topics, including background noise correction in the microbiome and source tracking in the microbiome with SNVs. She has one more paper coming out, please stay tuned! Congratulations Leah!
The lab celebrating Leah’s defense!