News
September 2024
Abdelraouf Dapour joined the lab as a rotation student. Welcome Raouf! <img src=’/images/teampic/raouf.jpg’ class=’img-responsive’ style=’max-width: 192px’
July 2024
Dennis Lavrov and Jan Vicente had a successful collection trip to La Parguera, Puerto Rico
July 2024
Momin Ahmed and Dennis Lavrov presented at the SMBE meeting in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
April 16, 2024
Olivia Lamb and Eric Qi presented their first year honors project at the ISU Annual Symposium on Undergraduate Research and Creative Expression
March 20-22, 2024
Dennis Lavrov presented a talk “Exploring the connection between unusual mt-genome organization, peculiar population biology of calcaronean sponges, and mRNA editing in their mitochondria” at the Biology Across Scales Symposium at the Gulbenkian Insitute of Science in Oeiras, Portugal.
December 4, 2023
Along with the article we launched a website on Demosponge phylogeny based on mtDNA
December 4, 2023
After multi-years delay, our long-suffering manuscript on demosponge phylogeny and classification is now published in Plos One .
July 23-28, 2023
Ehsan Kayal and Dennis Lavrov presented 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!