Photo by Paul Martens
Photo by Paul Martens
Shelly Anderson, undergraduate lab technician feeds algae to the daphnia specimens.
Photo by Paul Hebert, University of Guelph
Daphnia, or water flea, is a freshwater crustacean.
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Researchers from IU and other institutions will share in a $5 million, five-year grant to study why mixing and matching of DNA sequences occur, and how this genetic reshuffling benefits or harms individuals and species.
IUB evolutionary geneticist Michael Lynch is leading a multidisciplinary research team that includes IUB biologists Miriam Zolan and Curtis Lively, IUB mathematician Elizabeth Housworth, and genomicists Justen Andrews and John Colbourne, both of the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics at IUB (see related story at right).
Genetic recombination is a critical phenomenon in the life cycles of all sexual organisms, and it is also the main reason why every human being looks different. Lynch and his team will focus primarily on genetic recombination in Daphnia, a genus of tiny animals also known as water fleas. Daphnia species have been used for decades by biologists around the world for basic studies of how genes work.
The grant was awarded by the National Science Foundation’s Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research program, which encourages the cooperation of biologists, engineers, sociologists and information scientists in research.
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