Biology
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Phylogeny and biogeography of Neotropical flowering plant tribe Citharexyleae (Verbenaceae)
The New World tropics, or Neotropics, located within tropical latitudes of North and South America, are one of the most diverse ecoregion in the world. However, this diversity is poorly understood in terms of described ... -
Development and Evolution of Cell Behavior and Interactions during Danio Pattern Formation
Danio fishes offer a tractable system for elucidating mechanisms of pattern formation and how they evolve, as fishes in this genus display a diverse array of pigment patterns that arise from a common set of cell types. ... -
A community approach to understanding patterns and processes on rocky subtidal reefs in the Salish Sea
The structuring of marine benthic communities is driven by a diverse set of ecological factors, each exerting its influence to differing degrees across all spatial and temporal scales. Here we’ve leveraged a decade of ... -
Seasonal Migration, Gene Flow, and Speciation in North American Birds
Around 20% of bird species migrate annually between distinct breeding and wintering ranges and many sedentary populations shift cyclically within a single range in response to varying climates and food availability. Migration ... -
Chitin the Good Fight – Identification and Description of Chitin and Its Genes in Cnidaria
This dissertation explores broad aspects of chitin biology in Cnidaria, with the aim of incorporating glycobiology with evolution and development. Chitin is the second-most abundant biological polymer on earth and is most ... -
Local ecosystem processes modulate ocean acidification and its effect on benthic foundation species
Ocean acidification poses serious threats to coastal ecosystem services, yet few empirical studies have investigated how feedbacks from local ecological processes may modulate global trends of pH from rising atmospheric ... -
Linking protein function to complex traits
In this dissertation, I aim to establish the utility of linking large-scale protein mutagenesis to complex trait selection in order to better understand how subtle alterations to protein function lead to shifts in trait ... -
Hidden conflict in pollination and its implications for diversification
Pollinator-driven selection plays an important role in flowering plant diversification. Different pollinator guilds (e.g., butterfly, hummingbird, bat) have different preferences for and performance on flowers, which in ... -
Microbial evolution in changing environments
{\it Chapter 1.} Compensatory mutations play a critical role in the evolution of drug resistance in microorganisms. Most directly, they serve to alleviate the fitness cost commonly associated with initial drug resistance ... -
Mussel Attachment in a Dynamic Ocean: an Ecomechanical Perspective
Marine mussels are masters of underwater adhesion, attaching to a wide variety of substrates using an array of collagen-like fibers (byssal threads) that are each tipped with a powerful protein-based adhesive (plaque). The ... -
Sex and Fear: Mathematical models of mate choice, parental care, and maladaptive anxiety
In many contexts, animals must infer salient information about another individual indirectly by observing some other characteristic of that individual. In Chapter 1 of this thesis, a model of costly signaling is developed ... -
Beyond DNA Compaction: An Emerging View of the Diverse Functions of Drosophila Sperm Nuclear Basic Proteins
While sperm of different animals exhibit morphologically distinct features, the overall themes of sperm nuclei are surprisingly similar among species. Sperm nuclei are extremely condensed and transcriptionally inert, and ... -
Seasonal Circuitry: transcriptional and post-translational regulation of photoperiodic flowering in Arabidopsis thaliana
For plants, the transition towards reproductive development is timed so that it coincides with the most optimal external conditions. For many plant species, day length is an important cue in mediating this process. At the ... -
From species to populations: Genetic and eco-physiological divergence across Puerto Rican Anolis lizards
Species pairs of Puerto Rican anoles inhabit distinct thermal environments and are locally adapted to those environments with regard to physiological traits. In chapter 1, I analyzed multilocus nuclear genetic data and ... -
A landscape approach to forecasting climate change impacts on geographic ranges and phenologies of plants in the Washington Cascades
As the pace of environmental change accelerates, biologists are transforming the discipline of ecology from a fundamentally descriptive science to one that can be used to generate skillful forecasts. Although important ... -
Mammalian faunal recovery following the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction: a multifaceted investigation
The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction and subsequent recovery were a turning point for terrestrial ecosystems, signaling a shift from communities dominated by dinosaurs to those dominated by mammals. Mammalian ... -
Circadian clock regulation of chemical communication between plants and pollinators: a case study of Petunia flowers and Manduca hawkmoths
Pollination services from animals ensure successful reproduction and outcrossing for many flowering plants. Recruitment of pollinators most often involves a combination of signals which are deployed from floral tissues. ... -
Exploring the Mechanisms of Regeneration in Ptychodera flava
Hemichordates are marine acorn worms and a sister group to the echinoderms. Acorn worms share numerous developmental features with the chordates that the echinoderms do not share, suggesting that the common ancestor of the ... -
Epithelial signals that influence the form and function of somatosensory neurons in Drosophila
Cell-cell interaction plays an important role in regulating cell morphology and function. In the peripheral nervous system, somatosensory neurons innervate our skin and interact with the epidermis to help us sense the ... -
Effects of single mutations from experimental evolution of microbial proteins: Thermostability in phi-6 Cystovirus and toxin diversification in Escherichia coli
Experimental and directed evolution using microbes offer powerful methods for uncovering processes of evolution across the tree of life. The goal of such experiments is to generate mutational diversity, either through ...
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