2007-05: Farewell, Samantha Hill, Undergraduate.

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.

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)

2007-12: Congratulations & farewell, Dr. Cécile Gueidan.

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!

2008-09: Welcome Fernandez & Prieto, Visiting Researchers.

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.