News

July 23-28, 2023
Ehsan and Dennis will participated in and present at the SMBE meeting in Ferrara, Italy.

January 12-17, 2023
Mudith and Dennis participated in the Plant and Animal Genomics Conference in San Diego, CA and presented posters “The Draft Genome of the Pink Vase Sponge Niphates Digitalis and Evolution of Animal Mitochondrial Proteome” and “What can non-bilaterian animals tell us about mitochondrial biology and disease?”

November 6-8, 2022
Dennis participated in the Cell Symposia: Multifaceted Mitochondria in Seville, Spain and presented a poster “What can non-bilaterian animals tell us about mitochondrial biology and disease?”

Octover 10-14, 2022
Dennis participated in the 11th World Sponge Conference in Leiden, the Netherlands and presented a talk “Mitochondrial tRNA gene loss and cytosolic tRNA import in Haplosclerida”

Octover 1, 2022
Ehsan Kayal (re-)joined the lab as a Postdoc. Welcome, Ehsan!

August 15, 2022
Momin Ahmed joins the lab as a Ph.D. student. Welcome, Momin!

June 26, 2022
Dennis presented on “The intriguing evolution of the MutS mismatch repair gene family in animals” at the Evolution conference in Cleveland

January 13, 2022
New paper “Large dataset of octocoral mitochondrial genomes provides new insights into mt-mutS evolution and function” in DNA Repair .

November 10, 2021
Merritt Polomsky successfully defended her Master’s thesis “Evaluation of the evolutionary history of Clade B of haplosclerid sponges with an emphasis on tRNAs and tRNA synthetases.” Congratulations, Merritt!

September 15, 2021
Viraj Muthye moved to a new position in Calgary. Best of luck, Viraj!

August 17, 2021
New paper “Multiple losses of MSH1, gain of mtMutS, and other changes in the MutS family of DNA repair proteins in animals” in Genome Biology and Evolution .

January 15, 2021
Mudith Ekanayake joins the lab as a Ph.D. student. Welcome, Mudith!

September 18, 2020
Mudith Ekanayake joins the lab as a rotation student. Welcome, Mudith!

March 6, 2020
Another paper in Mitochondrion! “Causes and consequences of mitochondrial proteome size-variation in animals”: Mitochondrion 52:100-107.

February 3, 2020
Our new paper, “MMPdb and MitoPredictor: Tools for facilitating comparative analysis of animal mitochondrial proteomes” is published in Mitochondrion.

January 14, 2020
Dennis gave a talk at the Plant and Animal Genome XXVIII Conference

January 1, 2020
McKenzie Wishman joined the lab as a rotation student. Welcome, McKenzie!

December 20, 2019
Dennis gave a talk at a Special Symposium titled “Genome integrity and prions - impact on the evolution and human disease” at the Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer, UNMC, NE.

November 5, 2019
Dennis presented a poster (partially in Spanish!) at the Congreso Latinoamericano de Ciencias del Mar 2019

November 5, 2019
Our new paper, “Causes and consequences of mitochondrial proteome size-variation in animals” is published in BioRxiv.

October 26, 2019
Viraj Mutye’s dissertation is approved! Congratulations Dr. Mutye!

October 18, 2019
Axelle, Merritt, and Dennis presented at the Regional Cornbelt RNA Meeting.

October 5, 2019
The mystery of Myceliospongia is solved, cox2 and rnl mt-introns, and other cool stuff in our new paper on phylogeny and evolution of demosponges!.

September 20, 2019
Mahsa Hemmat joins the lab as a rotation student. Welcome, Mahsa!

August 30, 2019
New website on GitHub!