February 2026. New preprint from German. Read more about the crazy Y chromosomes of the mountain pine beetle here. For fun the lab hit the lanes!
August 2025. We welcome new PhD student Alex Preble to the lab. Alex is interested in sex chromosome evolution and changes in gene content and expression. Excited to see where his research goes!
July 2025. Camille's undergraduate research was published in G3! Really proud of the work she put in to see this one through. We welcome new postdoc Gabby Coffing to the lab! She will be working on a slew of new genomes to help us better understand neo-sex chromosomes. The Bracewell Lab also went to the field collecting beetles again. The baby burro that lived in our campground was a real plus! Lots of great things this month.
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June 2025. We welcome new lab manager/head technician Harshita Sharma! Harshita comes with a slew of great skills given her microbiology background. Stay tuned as we explore some new directions in the lab! Dwayne presented a poster and German gave a talk at Evolution in Athens, GA. Great conference this year.
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May 2025. Farewell party for Tereza Veselska! It was great having her join the lab and the visit laid the groundwork for future collaboration. Can't wait for you all to see what she is finding in these ambrosia fungi genomes. We also welcome new PhD student Thomas Johnson to the lab (far right). Thomas is interested in all things ambrosia beetle and we are excited to learn more!
January 2025. We welcome Dwayne Tally to the lab as a bioinformatics PhD student. Dwayne is interested in comparative genomics and chromosome evolution.
November 2024. Ryan published a paper on beetle sex chromosomes in PLOS Genetics. Just the tip of the iceberg in this group. So many unanswered questions....
August 2024. Big month! We welcome visiting Fulbright Scholar Tereza Veselska from the Czech Republic! She will be working on ambrosia beetle fungi genomics for the next ten months! Excited to see what she finds. We also hosted the Midwest Population Genetics Meeting in Bloomington and labbie Camille Pushman presented a poster. Great to see all the amazing population genetics going on around here.
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July 2024. Ryan went to the SMBE meeting in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and the Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Montreal, Canada. Poutine!
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June 2024. We welcome postdoc German Lagunas-Robles to the lab! The Bracewell lab also went to the field to collect several species of beetle. Good to be back in the woods.
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May 2024. Farewell party for Medhavi Verma. She is off to graduate school at ASU. Best wishes!!!! She made us all X chromosome keychains!
April 2024. The EEB section here at IU Biology had our retreat at McCormick's Creek State Park. Great to hang with the graduate students and hear about their science.
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March 2024. Labbies helped out with IU Science Fest!
December 2023. Big news! We won the Biology Department door decoration contest and get a free pizza party. There was some stiff competition this year... nice work labbies!
October 2023. We welcome Greta Heyl to the lab! She will be helping us with our Drosophila stocks and with karyotyping lots of different species. Happy to have her join the group. We also went on a fun lab hike/retreat in search of geodes and crinoid fossils.
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August 2023. Congratulations to Camille Pushman for winning the Best Undergraduate Poster at the Midwest PopGen meeting! Way to go! The Bracewell lab also received an NIH MIRA award supporting five years of research on chromosome evolution and consequences of Y chromosome degeneration in fruit flies and bark beetles! Woot!
July 2023. The summer has been full of conferences and fieldwork! Ryan went to the annual Evolution conference in Albuquerque and did some collecting in the backcountry on horseback! The lab hosted an amazing high school student and Holland Fellow for a week who helped analyze some Drosophila data we have been collecting at neighboring field sites!
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March 2023. Undergraduate (and soon to be PhD student in the lab!) Camille Pushman presented her research on detecting QTL in the mountain pine beetle at the Midwest Ecology and Evolution conference in Louisville, Kentucky. She was awarded an IU travel grant to participate in the meeting. In other news, Nanopore sequencing genomes in the lab is now underway!!!
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October 2022. The leaves are changing and the lab participated in IU ScienceFest! Great work from Medhavi, Camille, and Isabel, doing the crosses and putting the materials together showing a dihybrid cross and Drosophila species diversity. Lots of kids left with flies to take home so they could rear up the offspring and count the phenotypes!
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September 2022. We welcome undergraduate Isabel Brock to the lab! She will be working on a project with Drosophila we collected this summer.
August 2022. Busy month(s)! The lab went on a beetle and fly collecting mission in the western US that started in late July. A lot of road miles but also a lot of success! Soooo much stuff to sequence now. Ryan also spent some time in Gothic, CO, at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Fall classes are underway!
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June 2022. Big month! We welcome Medhavi Verma to the lab! Camille Pushman (undergrad) was awarded summer funding from the IU Honors College to continue her research identifying QTL in a bark beetle! Ryan Bracewell is off to two conferences this month (Genetics Society of America PEQG and Evolution) to present his research on beetle sex chromosome evolution. We also finally got our -80C! Lab cornhole boards are finished.
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February 2022. Lab renovations complete (along with cool sticker)! We also welcome Camille Pushman (undergrad) to the lab!!!
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January 2022. The Bracewell lab is officially open!!!
