The blog of Charles Delwiche's Molecular Systematics lab.
Olivia Velasquez has graduated and is on the job market. If anyone needs a bachelor’s level technician with excellent microbiology skills, including isolation of extreme halophiles, and some experience with DNA extraction and nanopore sequencing, reach out!
Former Master’s Student David Ferranti, now in the doctoral program at UC San Diego just published the work from his thesis in the Journal of Phycology: Ferranti, D.A. and Delwiche, C.F. (2024) Investigating the evolution of green algae with a large transcriptomic data set. J Phycol. 10.1111/jpy.13509 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpy.13509 David was originally supposed to be doing… Continue reading David Ferranti’s paper on the evolution of green algae
A review stemming from a symposium at the last Botanical Society of America meeting before the pandemic, this article summarizes and updates information on the colonization of the land. One of the important points in the review comes from micropaleontological and molecular systematic (“time tree”) evidence indicating that there was a terrestrial flora dating back… Continue reading New review on green algal evolution and the earliest land plants
In collaboration with Jan de Vries, Sebastian Hess, and others, we have published a new classification of Zygnematophyceae. Genome-scale molecular phylogenetic analyses consistently show the zygnematophytes as the sister to embryophytes. This came as something of a surprise (at least to me) because of the structural simplicity of zygnematophytes when compared to their close relatives… Continue reading A phylogenomically informed five-order system for the closest relatives of land plants
I am pleased to have received funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to explore genomic, metagenomic, and genetic evidence from Archaea regarding the origin of the eukaryotic sexual cycle. It is a three year grant starting in January. I am very excited to start this project!
I was elected an AAAS Fellow (a significant honor) in November 2020, but just got my certificate because of delays caused by the pandemic. Stay safe everybody! It looks like it might be showing itself out the door.
In collaboration with Mary Bisson and Shaun Phipps at the University at Buffalo, Graduate student Charles A. Goodman and I used RNAseq (i.e., quantitative Illumina sequencing) to examine the role of ion-channel transporters in the salt tolerance of Chara longifolia. It is nearly certain that the ancestral condition for Chara, and for all other Streptophyte… Continue reading Salt tolerance in Chara
Although most of my work is on photosynthetic protists, a long-term interest has been the role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution. That led a former student, Torstein Tengs, who now works for the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, to contact me for some help regarding evidence of gene transfer in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2,… Continue reading Gene transfer and the evolution of SARS-CoV-2
Our collaborative article on the evolution of multicellularity in green algae is out today in PNAS. This is interesting because multicellular organization seems to have evolved independently but nearly simultaneously in several lineages of green algae. Combining transcriptome sequencing with molecular phylogenetics and paleobotany we determined that these events took place during the late Tonian/Cryogenian,… Continue reading Evolution of Multicellularity
Graduate student Charlie Goodman and I have spent the last two weeks teaching a class titled “Algal Bioinformatics in the Context of Climate Change” at Shantou University in Shantou, China. Organized through the Shantou University – Universitá Politecnica delle Marche (Ancona, Italy) Joint Algal Research Center, the class was sponsored by the Shantou University College of… Continue reading Algal Bioinformatics at Shantou University, Shantou China