Huge congrats to Kendra Zwonitzer, who just successfully defended her PhD!
Kendra is a stellar scientist that has been a blast to work with over the past 5 years. She has been incredibly productive, authoring several papers and appearing as a co-author on several more. She is an absolute wizard at the lab bench and when it comes to bioinformatics – and has a skillset that everybody in the lab likes to parasitize (especially me).
Kendra’s dissertation is titled “Discerning Mechanisms of Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) Mutation through Sequence Analysis” and she’s been excited about mtDNA mutations even since before she joined the lab.
Her first chapter explores how homologous recombination may shape mtDNA mutation rates in plants. This entailed analyzing dozens of plant genomes from diverse species and leading an international research team. The paper was published in PNAS last year.
Her next chapter explores mtDNA substitutions across all animals, with a goal to undercover the diversity and drivers of mtDNA mutation mechanisms. She analyzed >16,000 animal mtDNAs for this work, and found that the well-known stories presented from model systems do not apply to many animals (although mostly do to vertebrates). She’s currently writing up this publication.
He last chapter is an experimental approach to understand how different putative mutation mechanisms affect what types of mtDNA mutations are generated and their effects on fitness. This involved raising tons of different strains and treatments for the model nematode C. elegans, measuring different phenotypes, and ultimately generating duplex sequencing data to examine mutations as they arise. She’s currently finishing up this story as well, adding a few more strains.
Kendra has been a fantastic student and is a rising star in mtDNA evolution. She will go on to do great things, but luckily for me, she’s agreed to stay on for a few months as a postdoc. I was dreading her leaving, so this will help ease the lab into a post-Kendra era.
