Our lab is leading a big effort to get undergrads involved in biodiversity research by transforming the UT turtle pond into a living lab. We’ve involved around 100 students so far!

Last year, students sampled turtles (mostly red-eared sliders) in urban ponds across Austin to ask whether microbiomes were different in turtles from different ponds, or if different body parts of the turtles had different microbial communities.

This year, we’re focusing on the UT turtles, examining microbiomes in the same individuals across seasons and asking whether individuals have specific microbiomes. The turtles were also moved off campus for a short time while the UT ponds were being repaired, so we can ask whether an environmental disturbance caused changes in microbial communities.

Here’s a story from KUT highlighting the turtles’ moving adventure, and another story on our work.

Next year the project will continue in the broad sense, but students will be working with a different PI to address a different question at the ponds.

Almost anyone can get involved in this work! Just email Justin to get started.

Congrats to Cameron Laurie, Serah Osborn, and Dan Tatulescu, all of whom graduated this semester after spending years as undergrad researchers in the lab. Dan and Serah both worked with postdoc Joseph Dubie on nematodes and various mito-related projects, while Cameron worked with Kendra on mito mutations – including doing some heavy bioinformatic lifting to characterize structural rearrangements across animal mito genomes.

We celebrated with a game night, and of course I forgot to take pictures, but here’s a photo of Joseph and Kendra drinking to the health of our recent grads:

Also, here’s a video UT made about community in our lab, featuring Serah and Dan:

Welcome to the lab! We’re in the Integrative Biology Department @ The University of Texas. We study evolution, ecology, and physiology and most of our projects have something to do with mitochondria. Click around to learn more and reach out if you have any questions.