Melissa successfully defended her Masters thesis this Summer! Congratulations to her, and you can read more about her research here in her new manuscript titled "The Effects of Gene Flow from Unsampled Ghost Populations Under the Isolation with Migration Model", now available as a preprint on BioRxiv.

Our Summer Scholars, Ryan and Roxanne, REU scholar, Jerrika, and student assistants Tanairi, and Al presented their summer research on competition assays in Eastern and Western populations of convergent lady beetles, and RNAseq to quantify differential gene expression across life history stages. Congratulations on a successful summer!

Arun had the honor of being invited to present his research at the 5th Annual BCB Symposium at Iowa State University in April 2019, 6 years after graduating from ISU! He also had the great opportunity to catch up with his PhD co-advisor, Dr. Karin Dorman, and other friends and family from the BCB program. 

Our new manuscript describing the morphometric correlations between D. coccinellae and their host coccinellid beetles has now been accepted at Biological Control! Watch for the full publication soon, but in the mean time, the preprint of this manuscript is currently available here. Congratulations to Sethuraman Lab alumnae, Yumary Vasquez and Hannah Vansant for leading this work!

Drs. Betsy Read and Arun Sethuraman recently received an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates award, which will fund a rigorous 10-week summer research program in next-generation sequencing technologies and their applications through 2021! For more details on this award, see the NSF abstract page, and to apply, visit the project's website.

Our recent work on surveying 200+ recent (2013-2018) population genetics literature, and their use of corrections for multiple testing is now published in Molecular Ecology Resources! This work was led entirely by Sethuraman Lab undergraduate research assistants - Ken Mey, Stefany Nunez, Nicolette Gonzalez, Christy Grenier, Khyati Kansagra, and Gwen Wulf, and graduate research assistant, Bryce Summerhays. Read the paper here.

Ken and Stefany recently presented our work on inconsistencies in applying multiple-comparison corrections across population genetics studies in recent years at the regional SACNAS meeting, held at UCSD. A manuscript on this work is currently in review at Molecular Ecology Resources!

The InRelate paper, describing a method to estimate genetic relatedness in admixed populations was recently published in G3, and can be accessed here. The code for InRelate can be accessed on my GitHub page here. Some of Dr. Sethuraman's postdoc work with Dr. Jody Hey was also recently published in MBE, and can be accessed here. IMa3 is the latest offering from the Hey Lab, and offers a method to estimate the population tree in conjunction with evolutionary demographic history under the Isolation with Migration (IM) model. Code for IMa3 can be downloaded from the Hey Lab GitHub page here.

Arun's recent manuscript describing a likelihood-based method to estimate pairwise genetic relatedness between individuals derived from inbred/admixed populations, InRelate, was just accepted (pending minor revisions) at G3! Watch this space for links to the publication. The code for InRelate can be accessed here.