Evolution of biotic interactions

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We are committed to dismantling white supremacy in the United States, academia and STEM.​
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Lab news
May-June 2020
-Jessica Aguilar and Noah Whiteman were recommended for a mentee-mentor HHMI Gilliam Fellowship for Advanced Study designed "to building inclusive lab environments and helping increase diversity among the next generation of scientists." 
-Saron Akalu (undergraduate student) was accepted to U. C. Berkeley - Integrative Biology program!
-Kirsten Verster (Ph.D. candidate) was accepted as a Graduate Remote Instruction Innovation Fellow for the summer!
-Julianne Peláez (Ph.D. candidate) won a Chateaubriand Fellowship from the Embassy of France in the United States to travel to France and collaborate with Professor Fredéric Marion Poll on gustatory functional evolution in Scaptomyza! Julianne also led a France-Berkeley Fund collaborative proposal that was funded to further strengthen the collaboration between the Marion Poll lab and our lab!
-Diler Haji (Ph.D. student) was awarded a Graduate Research Excellence Grant -- the R.C. Lewontin Early Award, from the Society for the Study of Evolution for his research on evolutionary genomics!
-Nicolas Alexandre was awarded a Philomathia Fellowship from UC-Berkeley for his research on hummingbird adaptation!
-Shivani Sundaram (undergraduate student) will be attending medical school at University of Southern California in Fall 2020!

March-April 2020
-Kirsten Verster (Ph.D. candidate) won the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award from UC-Berkeley!
-Diler Haji (Ph.D. student) won the Short-Term Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Fellowship to study tropical fruit flies and inversions!
-Jessica Aguilar (Ph.D. candidate) was awarded Big C Funds from UC-Berkeley for inclusiveIB initiative in Integrative Biology!
-Dr. Tim O'Connor (former Ph.D. candidate) landed a three year NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship from NIH to work with Professor Marcus Kronforst (and in collaboration with Professors Joy Bergelson and Joe Thornton) at University of Chicago!
-Julianne Peláez (Ph.D. candidate) won a Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research!
-Dr. Teruyuki Matsunaga (Postdoctoral fellow)  won a  Uehara Memorial Foundation Research Fellowship!
-Professor Noah Whiteman was awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship on April 8th!

Welcome
​The Whiteman Laboratory is within the Department of Integrative Biology and Center for Computational Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and is affiliated with the Essig Museum of Entomology, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and University and Jepson Herbaria. 

Our research follows from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, who largely focused on the evolution of new traits shaped by ecological interactions between species. Such interactions are an evolutionary crucible that can lead to stunning new adaptations that increase the fitness of their bearers. Although a simplification, traits arising from host-parasite, predator-prey and mutualism are often straightforward to study because their genomic architectures tend to be simpler, and their evolutionary histories dynamic, than those shaped by the abiotic environment. Such interactions also drive the evolution of reproductive isolation, resulting in the origin of new species.

On the one hand, adaptive evolution that results from natural selection is a force that often erodes genetic variation associated with variation in a particular trait. On the other hand, alternative alleles may persist within populations through balancing natural selection that acts across spatially varying and temporally fluctuating environments to maintain genetic variation associated with variation in a trait. Hybridization and horizontal gene transfer between species also introduces novel and divergent genes that give rise to new traits.

We use interdisciplinary approaches to study: (1) how and why new adaptations arising through ecological interactions evolve, and (2) how and why genetic variation is maintained by natural selection in species. We mostly study plant-animal and plant-animal-microbial interactions. We attempt to integrate research across levels of biological organization using techniques from behavior, biochemistry, chemical ecology, comparative anatomy/morphology /physiology, computational biology, evo-devo, genetics, genomics, molecular and cellular biology (including CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing), phylogeny and neuroscience.

Why do we study species interactions?