Category: Uncategorized

2019-11: Lutzoni Lab hosts lichen workshop for North Carolina School of Math and Science students

  By ,

The Lutzoni lab (Dr. Scott LaGreca, Dr. François Lutzoni, Ian Medeiros, and Carlos Pardo De la Hoz) hosted a two-day lichen workshop for 15 junior and senior high school students from the North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM) in Durham. On the first day, students learned the different lichen growth forms and basic morphological structures within a teaching lab setting, and then went on a field trip to the Eno River State Park to look at lichens. The trip was a great opportunity to highlight the ecological characteristics of different groups of lichens. On the second day, we taught how to use a dichotomous key, and together we identified three lichen specimens at the species level. Many of the students had the opportunity to collect their own specimens on the school campus and we helped them identify them as well. We were thoroughly impressed with their abilities and pleased to learn that the workshop inspired them to pursue three research projects centered on lichens at NCSSM. We thank Dr. Erin Quinlan at NCSSM for her support in organizing this workshop. We look forward to continued interaction with NCSSM students and faculty in the future. This outreach activity was funded in part by the National Science Foundation grants DEB 1541548 and 1929994 to François Lutzoni and Jolanta Miadlikowska.

IMG_5857

thumbnail_IMG_5824

IMG_2839

2006-12: Farewell, Frank Kauff, Postdoctoral Research Associate.

  By ,

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.

2007-01: Farewell, Valerie Reeb, Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Research Associate.

  By ,

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!

2007-05: Farewell, Samantha Hill, Undergraduate.

  By ,

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!

 

2007-11: A new version of INAASE.

  By ,

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)