Primary source materials focused on the history of boarding schools in the state of Alaska. Links to digitized resources and descriptions provided by the Alaska State Archives.

limited contract

Assistant Professor - Systems Neurophysiology

Complex traits that span multiple tissues and systems often integrate large numbers of genes across development, physiology, and behavior, making it challenging to identify their essential components. Blood feeding in mosquitoes is one such trait. It is ancestral to the mosquito family, maintained in most species for ~200 million years, and was independently lost in three lineages. These convergent losses offer a natural experiment to discover the genetic, physiological, and neural features required for blood feeding. We assembled high-quality, chromosome-level genomes for seven mosquito species, along with whole-brain tomographic reconstructions. Our study spanned the three known non-blood-feeding lineages (Toxorhynchites rutilus, Topomyia yanbarensis, and Malaya genurostris), blood-feeding relatives, and the variable blood feeder Wyeomyia smithii. Comparing orthologous gene clades, we detected convergent gene loss specific to the three lineages that had lost blood feeding. The losses include the salivary platelet-aggregation inhibitor Aegyptin, blood-activated serine proteases such as Chymotrypsin-1 and 2, and a carboxylesterase expressed in the female fat body and brain glia. The loss of blood feeding also extended to chemosensation. Non-blood feeders lack two odorant-binding protein clades, two ionotropic receptor clades associated with blood-component taste detection, and odorant receptor clades expressed in a discrete, strongly female-biased population of antennal neurons. Female-biased head gene expression was reduced in non-blood feeders. Finally, examination of whole-brain tomographic reconstructions across the species revealed smaller antennal lobes in non-blood-feeding females, consistent with reduced olfactory input. Together, these findings identify a compact set of genes, expression patterns, and brain regions associated with blood feeding, offering an evolutionary entry point for functional dissection of how this complex and dangerous trait is built and dismantled.

Many neural circuits undergo competitive input selection, a process in which supernumerary connections compete for innervation territory on target cells. This process can create atypical circuits when...

An updated phylogeny of bats is presented, based on new genome assemblies and many ancient fossils and including all known bat families.

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The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.

Physicians work on both the research side and at the patient bedside, translating questions raised in clinical practice into rigorous scientific investigations and bringing those discoveries back to p...

Irreplaceable research samples have been destroyed, experiments delayed and lab access cut off after a four-day power outage at Western University in London, Ont., left biology researchers scrambling ...

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Irreplaceable research samples have been destroyed, experiments delayed, and lab access cut off after a four-day power outage at Western University left biology researchers scrambling to protect years...

Aggression is an evolutionarily conserved behavior essential for survival and reproduction, yet escalation to high-intensity forms entails substantial metabolic costs and injury risks, necessitating p...