Charles Darwin
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From, On the Origin of Species (1872) Charles Darwin:
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." |
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 Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and University and Jepson Herbaria.
Our research follows from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, who focused on the evolution of traits shaped by biotic interactions (interactions between organisms). Such traits are often more straightforward to study because their genomic architectures tend to be simpler than those shaped by the abiotic environment.
Our approach to studying adaptations is interdisciplinary, and uses studies of behavior, biochemistry, chemical ecology, computational biology, genetics, genomics, molecular biology (including CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing), and neuroscience.
We focus on understanding (1) how free-living organisms evolve to become parasitic and specialized, (2) how hosts defend themselves against parasites, (3) and how species interactions drive specialization and the maintenance of functional genetic variation within species.
The main model systems we use include flies in the Drosophila lineage (Scaptomyza) that attack the genetic model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and other glucosinolate-bearing plants (like wasabi), insects specialized on cardenolide-bearing plants (like foxglove and milkweeds), creosote-feeding insects and broad-tailed hummingbirds.
Our research follows from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, who focused on the evolution of traits shaped by biotic interactions (interactions between organisms). Such traits are often more straightforward to study because their genomic architectures tend to be simpler than those shaped by the abiotic environment.
Our approach to studying adaptations is interdisciplinary, and uses studies of behavior, biochemistry, chemical ecology, computational biology, genetics, genomics, molecular biology (including CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing), and neuroscience.
We focus on understanding (1) how free-living organisms evolve to become parasitic and specialized, (2) how hosts defend themselves against parasites, (3) and how species interactions drive specialization and the maintenance of functional genetic variation within species.
The main model systems we use include flies in the Drosophila lineage (Scaptomyza) that attack the genetic model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and other glucosinolate-bearing plants (like wasabi), insects specialized on cardenolide-bearing plants (like foxglove and milkweeds), creosote-feeding insects and broad-tailed hummingbirds.
Latest news from the Whiteman Laboratory:
2nd-year Ph.D. student Jessica Aguilar was awarded was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2019! Congrats Jess!
First-year Ph.D. student Hiromu Suzuki was awarded a JASSO long-term graduate fellowship from the Government of Japan! Congrats Hiro!
Diler Haji will be joining the lab and our department as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2019! Diler comes from University of Connecticut where he worked for his undergraduate and M.S. with Professor Chris Simon on evolution of cicadas and their symbionts. Diler also was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Congrats Diler!
Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Marianthi Karageorgi won the Godfrey Hewitt Mobility Award to collect flies in Europe for her research! Congrats Marianna!
Noah was interviewed by UC Berkeley News of the Fiat Vox podcast:
http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/07/03/podcast-growing-up-gay-in-rural-minnesota/
Ph.D. candidates Kirsten Verster and Tim O'Connor each received a summer research grant from the Department of Integrative Biology!
Ph.D candidate Tim O'Connor received another Philomathia fellowship to support his dissertation research next year. Congrats Tim!
We're getting close to submitting our ten-years-in-the-making genome paper on Scaptomyza flava and relatives. Stay tuned!
Noah was a co-chair of the 2018 Annual Drosophila Research Conference (of the Genetics Society of America) in Philadelphia, the next conference will be held in Dallas, Texas.
Ph.D. student Nicolas Alexandre received a grant from the David and Marvalee Wake Fund to support his work on broad-tailed hummingbird genomics.
Ph.D. student Julianne Pelaez received a Mentored Research Award from UC-Berkeley
Ph.D. candidate Tim O'Connor received a 2018 Graduate Student Research Award from the American Society of Naturalists to study the evolutionary history of interactions between creosote bush and the remarkable insect community it hosts:
www.amnat.org/announcements/ANNStuResearchAWA.html
Ph.D. student Julianne Pelaez received a 2018 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation to support her dissertation research on reproductive biology of drosophilid flies.
Former Ph.D. students Dr. Parris Humphrey and Dr. Andrew Gloss led a recent publication on habitat-associated evolutionary divergence in a plant driven by interactions with herbivores for a special issue on plant-herbivore interactions in Oecologia (PDF is found here).
2nd-year Ph.D. student Jessica Aguilar was awarded was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2019! Congrats Jess!
First-year Ph.D. student Hiromu Suzuki was awarded a JASSO long-term graduate fellowship from the Government of Japan! Congrats Hiro!
Diler Haji will be joining the lab and our department as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2019! Diler comes from University of Connecticut where he worked for his undergraduate and M.S. with Professor Chris Simon on evolution of cicadas and their symbionts. Diler also was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Congrats Diler!
Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Marianthi Karageorgi won the Godfrey Hewitt Mobility Award to collect flies in Europe for her research! Congrats Marianna!
Noah was interviewed by UC Berkeley News of the Fiat Vox podcast:
http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/07/03/podcast-growing-up-gay-in-rural-minnesota/
Ph.D. candidates Kirsten Verster and Tim O'Connor each received a summer research grant from the Department of Integrative Biology!
Ph.D candidate Tim O'Connor received another Philomathia fellowship to support his dissertation research next year. Congrats Tim!
We're getting close to submitting our ten-years-in-the-making genome paper on Scaptomyza flava and relatives. Stay tuned!
Noah was a co-chair of the 2018 Annual Drosophila Research Conference (of the Genetics Society of America) in Philadelphia, the next conference will be held in Dallas, Texas.
Ph.D. student Nicolas Alexandre received a grant from the David and Marvalee Wake Fund to support his work on broad-tailed hummingbird genomics.
Ph.D. student Julianne Pelaez received a Mentored Research Award from UC-Berkeley
Ph.D. candidate Tim O'Connor received a 2018 Graduate Student Research Award from the American Society of Naturalists to study the evolutionary history of interactions between creosote bush and the remarkable insect community it hosts:
www.amnat.org/announcements/ANNStuResearchAWA.html
Ph.D. student Julianne Pelaez received a 2018 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation to support her dissertation research on reproductive biology of drosophilid flies.
Former Ph.D. students Dr. Parris Humphrey and Dr. Andrew Gloss led a recent publication on habitat-associated evolutionary divergence in a plant driven by interactions with herbivores for a special issue on plant-herbivore interactions in Oecologia (PDF is found here).