Category: News

December 2006 – Farewell, Frank Kauff, Postdoctoral Research Associate.

The members of the Lutzoni lab send their best wishes to Frank Kauff, a postdoctoral research associate who has worked with us for four years. He begins a new position on December 15, 2006, as a Junior Professor in Molecular Phylogenetics of lower plants at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. Congratulations and good luck to Frank as he moves on to the next stage.

January 2007 – Farewell, Valerie Reeb, Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Research Associate.

It is time to bid farewell to our own Valerie Reeb who has been a member of the Lutzoni lab for many years as a technician, graduate student and a postdoctoral research associate. We would like to congratulate her on obtaining a two year post-doctoral position at the University of Iowa with Debashish Bhattacharya. She will be working on the evolution and phylogeny of microbial eukaryotes. The project, part of an AToL (Assembling the Tree of Life) grant, consists of sequencing 9 genes for 200 taxa in order to elucidate the eukaryotic tree of life and address specific hypotheses regarding eukaryotic evolution. Congratulations and good luck to our first PhD!

May 2007 – Farewell, Samantha Hill, Undergraduate.

Samantha has been with us for many years in the lab keeping everything running smoothly from week to week. From pouring culture plates to autoclaving glassware, she has always provided us with our research needs. We will miss her as she moves on to bigger and better things!

October 2007 –

Congratulations to Brendan Hodkinson for passing his prelims!

November 2007 – A new version of INAASE (INtegration of Ambiguously Aligned SEquences).

Since it’s inception, INAASE (a program developed for the integration of ambiguously aligned sequences into phylogenetic analyses) has been an important tool for revealing signal in gaps and hypervariable regions. In the newest version, an interface has made it more user-friendly, and the alignment algorithm has been significantly improved. Here you will find the most recent version of
INAASE (3.0; ZIP file). It has been tested on Mac OSX, Windows XP and Linux (Debian 4.0, desktop version, but any other distro should also work). Please note that it works only with Java 1.5 or higher installed.

Citation:
Lutzoni, F., Wagner, P., Reeb V., and Zoller, S. 2000. Integrating ambiguously aligned regions of DNA sequences in phylogenetic analyses without violating positional homology. Systematic Biology 49:628-651.
Download publication (PDF file)

December 2007 – Congratulations and farewell, Dr. Cécile Gueidan.

Lutzoni lab members congratulate Dr. Cécile Gueidan for passing her thesis defense! She has completed her graduate work on Verrucariales and related fungi, and is looking forward to conducting her postdoctoral research at the Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures (CBS) in the Netherlands. We send our best wishes to Cécile as she returns to her home continent!

January 2008 –

Welcome, Bernie Ball, Research Associate

September 2008 – Welcome, Samantha Fernandez and Maria Prieto, Visiting Researchers.

The Lutzoni Lab is excited to welcome two visiting researchers to Duke University: Samantha Fernandez and Maria Prieto. Both hail from the country of Spain, and have come to our lab to learn new techniques and hone their skills for studying the systematics of lichen-forming fungi. Samantha’s research concentrates on the lichen genus Diploschistes, while Maria is interested primarily in the systematics ofCatapyrenium (sensu lato). The relationships between the members of these genera remain quite difficult to elucidate, and the results obtained by both of these researchers will surely represent major contributions to the field of lichen systematics.

March 2009 – Welcome, Lucyna Sliwa, Visiting Researcher.

The Lutzoni Lab welcomes Lucyna Sliwa of the Polish Academy of Sciences! On her short-term visit, she will be learning molecular techniques that can be applied to questions about the systematics ofLecanora and related taxa.