Previous happenings in the Cassin Sackett Lab:
March 2023: Very excited to see the fruit of a long labor by our colleague Kristina Paxton in our paper on the transcriptome response to experimental avian malaria infection in Hawai'i 'amakihi. Read the paper here!
March 2022: Carlos was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Graduate Fellowship to explore changes in the genomes of endangered and stable Hawaiian honeycreepers. Congratulations, Carlos!November 2021: Loren is off to Colombia on a Fulbright award to pursue capybara infectious disease research. She will be collaborating with Universidad de los Andes scientists. See more here. Wish her luck!
October 2021: Our latest paper -- led by University of South Florida undergraduate Chadwick Kaufmann -- has been published! Read here about fine-scale spatial variation in soil microbial communities in different partitions of prairie dog burrows. Fantastic job, Chadwick!
March 2021: Our paper on endangered Kaua'i honeycreeper genetics has been published! This was a huge collaborative effort and we want to express gratitude towards our colleagues at Kaua'i Forest Bird Recovery Project and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance who are doing the hard work on the ground. Check out our paper here.
February 2021: Sydni's paper presenting genomic resources for prairie dogs has been published! You can view it here.
Spring 2020: Our latest paper, reporting on the assembly of a high-quality Gunnison's prairie dog genome, is out in Genome Biology and Evolution. This paper was led by the amazing Mirian Tsuchiya and you can read it here!
January 2020: Loren's invited perspective "Promising Protocols for Parasites" was published in Molecular Ecology Resources. Read it here.
January 2020: Loren is spending 6 months as a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is working to uncover the relative importance of microbiota and host genome on infection with several pathogens, using the capybara--the world's largest rodent--as a model. See more here.
Prior to 2020
July 2019: Our book chapter on Avian Genomics in Conservation is officially published and available! You can find it at https://rd.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-16477-5.
May 2019: Sydni Joubran received a grant from the Society for Systematic Biology and the Linnaean Society to explore the genomics and mechanisms of the early stages of divergence in mammals. Congratulations, Sydni!
November 2018: New paper in Molecular Ecology on genomics of the evolution of tolerance to avian malaria in Hawai'i 'amakihi!
May 2018: I had the opportunity to discuss our lab's research on the podcast Science For The People. I spoke after Boris Schmid, who discussed the critical role of fleas in plague transmission, and I talked about the effects of plague on prairie dogs and other wildlife. You can listen to the episode here!
October 2017: New paper out in the International Journal for Parasitology on explaining parasite heterogeneity on hosts: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpara.2017.07.006
Spring 2017: We are excited to learn that our proposal on malaria transmission across spatial and climatic gradients in Hawaii was funded by NSF through the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program. Our lab is collaborating with Dina Fonseca (Rutgers), Rob Fleischer and Michael Campana (Smithsonian National Zoo), Nina Fefferman (University of Tennessee), Jeff Foster (Northern Arizona University), Marm Kilpatrick (UC Santa Cruz), and Eben Paxton (USGS Pacific Islands Research Center).