Happy Holidays!
Lab lunch in Westwood to celebrate the start of 2023!
Keystone symposium on The Human Microbiome: Ecology and Evolution
Nandita had the pleasure of presenting a talk based on recent from the lab at a recent Keystone symposium on The Human Microbiome: Ecology and Evolution. PhD student, Richard Wolff also presented his poster on his paper on Ecological Diversity Emerges at the Level of Strains in the Human Gut Microbiome.
Happy Halloween
Garud Lab Halloween 2022, in front of the Life Sciences Building where we work.
Farewell BIG students!
Thank you to Kaysa and Julianna for their hard work this summer!
Lab picnic and bubble tea
Garud lab picnic and bubble tea outings this summer:
Welcome Aina, Michael, and Peter!!!
We are extremely fortunate to have a stellar group of three PhD students joining the lab this year: Aina Martinez Zurita, Michael Wasney, and Peter Laurin. Welcome Aina, Michael and Peter!
Welcome BIG summer students!!!
We are trhilled to welcome our summer Bruins in Genomics interns!!!
Julianna Perez is a rising senior studying Computer Science at Arizona State University. She is also pursuing a minor in Biological Sciences and hopes to combine the two disciplines in research. She wants to attend graduate school and study computational biology.
Kaysa Pfannmuller (she/her/hers) is a senior at Southern Oregon University majoring in Biology and minoring in Chemistry and a member of the Honors College at SOU. When not in class, at work or in the lab, she enjoys reading, spending time outdoors and hanging out with her golden retriever.
Evolutionary Dynamics of the Infant Gut Microbiome
We are thrilled to share that our paper entitled ‘Rapid evolution and strain turnover in the infant gut microbiome’ is now out in Genome Research! We find that the infant microbiome evolves faster than the adult microbiome, and moreoever, in our revision, we find that C-section infants have faster rates of evolution compared to vaginally-born infants. Please check out our paper!
Figure 5b from our paper: We observe the same gene classes being mutated multiple times across infants and adults.
Garud lab at PEQG!
This was our first time attending a conference in-person as a group! Mariana, Jon, Ricky, and Nandita all presented posters on our work in the lab.
Enrichment of hard sweeps on the X chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster
Recently Mariana Harris and Nandita Garud posted a preprint on hard and soft sweeps on the X versus autosome of D. melanogaster!
Here is the abstract!
The characteristic properties of the X chromosome, such as male hemizygosity and its unique inheritance pattern, expose it to natural selection in a way that can be different from the autosomes. Here, we investigate the differences in the tempo and mode of adaptation on the X chromosome and autosomes in a population of Drosophila melanogaster. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that due to hemizygosity and a lower effective population size on the X, the relative proportion of hard sweeps, which are expected when adaptation is gradual, compared to soft sweeps, which are expected when adaptation is rapid, is greater on the X than on the autosomes. We quantify the incidence of hard versus soft sweeps in North American D. melanogaster population genomic data with haplotype homozygosity statistics and find an enrichment of the proportion of hard versus soft sweeps on the X chromosome compared to the autosomes, confirming predictions we make from simulations. Understanding these differences may enable a deeper understanding of how important phenotypes arise as well as the impact of fundamental evolutionary parameters on adaptation, such as dominance, sex-specific selection, and sex-biased demography.
Please check out our work and let us know what you think!
Simulations suggest that sweeps on the X on average should be harder than on autosomes (Figure 2 of Harris and Garud, 2022)