Lead Story

Our first paper on turtle research at the UT turtle pond was just published at PLoS One! Big congrats especially to Mariangel, the grad student that oversaw a lot of this work and took the lead on data analysis and writing up the paper.

This is the first study from a long-term research project centered on getting undergraduates involved in biodiversity research at UT. We started this work a few years ago in collaboration with the UT undergraduate EEB club with seed funding from the UT Greenfund that was later enhanced quite a bit by a research education grant from the UT Stengl-Wyer endowment. We’ve since had >100 students involved to some degree in research around the turtle pond, which is coordinated by undergraduate team leaders, graduate students, and multiple faculty members.

This first study investigated microbiomes in red-eared sliders and how they vary across body locations and different urban ponds around Austin. We found that microbiomes are shaped by both body location and pond, with turtles at the UT turtle pond having particularly distinctive shell microbiomes.

This project was also important in establishing a baseline at the UT turtle pond – both in what types of microbes live there and how many and which turtles are there. We’ve now PIT tagged all turtles at the turtle pond and have baseline data on their size, weight, appearance, etc.

More research is underway with these turtles, so stay tuned for other projects!

We just published an article in J. Chemical Ecology investigating toxic cyanide accumulation in the colorful matador bug (pictured above) and less colorful coreids. Led by Colin Morrison and involving lots of collaboration across the department, we asked whether the matador bug’s colorful leg flags that act as anti-predator signals might be backed-up by a toxic punch.

Former postdoc in the lab Ummat Somjee (just starting his lab at Cornell) used bugs in the family Coreidae as models to look at the evolution of sexually-selected signals. However, unlike most bugs in the family, the matador bug doesn’t use its back legs for sexual displays – Ummat showed previously they are used in stereotypical anti-predator displays. Because matador bugs feed on toxic Passiflora plants, we thought they might use sequestered cyanogenic compounds to also deter predators.

Although we confirmed this hypothesis, the non-colorful coreids we included as negative controls turned out to also have high, potentially toxic levels of cyanogenic compounds. So it turns out that toxic sequestration to prevent predation might be more common than coloration would suggest, which has been suggested for toxic frogs and other taxa.

Stay tuned for more upcoming work involving matador bugs, sexual selection, and transitions to anti-predator signaling!

Russel just presented his dissertation work on the population genomics of the newly-crowned state shrimp of Hawaii, Halocaridina rubra, at the 2026 Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference (PEQG). This is a really cool story that has, in some ways, been over 20 years in the making. Its both a great example of how population genetics can inform conservation decisions, why signals from mitochondrial genes should be revisited with nuclear genomic data, and how gene flow works in a really unusual ecosystem.

Russ is writing up this work now, so keep an eye out for it before too long. It has involved dozens of researchers, most notably many folks in Hawaii that have been kind enough to help us out over many years.

Sounds like Russ had an awesome time at the conference – I’m jealous I didn’t get to go!

Congrats to Sneha Chandak, an undergraduate researcher in the lab who just graduated and was named a 2026 Dean’s Honored Graduate! This is a very selective award, given to about 30 graduates each year, representing the top ~1% of graduates in the college.

Sneha has been a fantastic researcher in the lab, working on several projects involving anchialine organisms. Most notably, she formed a collaboration with Brian Sedio’s lab to examine the metabolomics of anchialine sediment samples. She found that while different habitats are composed of different microbes – they have a taxonomic “fingerprint” – their metabolites are fairly similar, suggesting different microbial communities might be performing similar metabolisms overall. She presented this work at SICB 2026.

She has also worked with several other labs across campus and her senior thesis was centered on how an anti-DEI bill affected student organizations at UT. She’s headed to Rice University in the Fall to start a PhD in microbiology. It was great to get to celebrate her and the other “DHGs” this year!

I’m excited about this new special issue in Philosophical Transactions B on the evolutionary genetics of mitochondria. Organized by Venkatesh Nagarajan-Radha and others, this issue brings together a large group of diverse biologists studying the mechanistic basis of mitochondrial evolution, including early endosymbiosis, mitochondrial mRNA editing, sex, uniparental inheritance, heteroplasmy and mitochondrial-nuclear coevolution. The papers span a diverse set of methods, organisms, and scales, with some of the leading scientists across mitochondrial evolution and ecology.

Our lab was involved with 3 papers in this special issue:

1. In Havird et al., we collaborated with Bo Zhang to again look at mtDNA evolution in mites – this time seeing whether parasitic mites had mtDNA evolving under relaxed selection compared to predatory mites. We generally found the opposite, predatory mites had mtDNA with relatively relaxed selection, which we think is related to life-history traits and is supported by much higher rates of genome rearrangements in some predatory groups. This was a fun example of how to examine evolutionary processes in mtDNA and disentangle signatures of relaxed vs. positive selection.
2. In Klabacka et al., we review how mitonuclear interactions play out in asexual vertebrates. Because asexual vertebrates generally show features of clonality and hybridity, they have some unusual predictions for mitonuclear interactions and coevolution between the two genomes. We review these possibilities and offer some outlines for future experimental work to test these predictions.
3. In Kuster et al., we ask whether the common approach to break up the nuclear genome into genes that are vs. aren’t interacting with mitochondrial-encoded gene products is powerful enough to detect signatures of mitonuclear coevolution and incompatibilities. We generally find that genome-wide scan approaches where the genome is broken into these simple gene categories are likely underpowered to detect incompatibilities with even drastic fitness effects.

Tons of other great papers are also included in this special issue, check it out!

Huge congrats to Jess Sterling, who just successfully defended her PhD!

Jess has been a great lab member and researcher, who has made superb progress over the last 5 years. She joined the lab to work on immunity in marine systems, but ended up getting excited about how mitochondria might contribute to aging. She’s done side projects on bacterial communities in anchialine ecosystems, population genetics, and mitochondrial evolution of different animals, but her dissertation is titled “Discerning Mechanisms of Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) Mutation through Sequence Analysis”.

In her first chapter, she examined patterns of mtDNA sequence evolution in 4 groups of animals with quite variable lifespans to see if any mtDNA evolutionary patterns correlated with lifespan. She supported some previous findings showing that vertebrates with longer lifespans might have decreased mtDNA mutation rates, but ultimately she concluded that this was probably a methodological artifact and the pattern disappears when taking generation time into account. This story (and more) is in review now and should be published soon.

Her other projects made use of the model nematode C. elegans and several naturally occuring strains with variable lifespans. She characterized mitochondrial physiology among the strains and performed duplex sequencing to ask how mitochondrial mutations accumulated throughout the life of different strains. She’s wrapping up this work now and finding some really interesting conclusions, suggesting what’s been described in mammals might not apply to animals at large.

Finally, Jess has secured her “dream job” which she’ll be starting next Spring, working for the Boston Consulting Group (and staying based in Austin!).

Congrats again Jess!!!

Congrats to Reuben Matthews, an undergrad in the lab who is attending the Society for Neuroscience and presenting a poster on mitochdonrial DNA copy number and neurodegenerative diseases. Reuben has been in the lab for about a year and has driven a new collaboration between us and Jennifer Donegan’s lab here at UT who is interested in neurodegeneration.

Reuben and Jennifer’s student Sifallah have been working together on a meta-analysis asking whether patients with neurodegenerative diseases have different numbers of mtDNA genome copies compared to a control population. So far, they’ve found a weak signal for lower mtDNA CN associated with neurodegeneration, but lots of heterogeneity among studies. Some of that variation can be explain by which disease was being investigated, which tissue was used for sampling, and which geographic location the population came from. But, lots of variation remain and we’re not sure why some studies find a big effect and others don’t.

Reuben will be following up on this with a lab experiment using mice genetic models for different neurodegenerative diseases and examining mt CN in different tissues.

PhD candidate Mariangel Correa-Orellana was just awarded a prestigious HHMI Gilliam Fellowship! This is a very competitive award (>800 applicants this year and only 30 fellows) designed to launch promising young scientists into a scientific career. In addition to 3 years of fellowship support, Mariangel receives a yearly allowance for travel and professional development. This is also the first time anyone from UT has received this award.

This award also provides a great opportunity to get connected with the HHMI community through yearly conferences and meetings with other HHMI fellows.

Finally, as her adviser, I also get to benefit from this award as it includes a serious mentorship development component. I get to attend monthly online mentorship meetings as well as an in-person workshop to enhance my mentorship next Spring.

Mariangel’s dissertation focuses on microbial ecology of anchialine habitats in Hawaii. She’s interested in what these microbes are doing and will be applying metagenomics to ask what metabolic functions different members of these communities are performing, as well as whether these functions are different across different habitat types (for example, habitats with a distinct orange crust community vs. those with mud substrates or green algal mats). She’s also interested in animal-microbe interactions in these habitats and will be taking a deep dive into the gut microbiomes of the main shrimp species that is endemic to these habitats (opae ula, Halocaridina rubra).

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.

We just published a study in Ecology and Evolution, led by former postdoc Liming Cai, now at the University of Florida, examining mitochondrial respiration and mitochdonrial gene content in a family of parasitic plants, Orobanchaceae. This family has been a great model in Liming’s research because it contains closely related free-living, hemiparasitic (like the cancer roots pictured above), and holoparasitic species (including some independent origins of holoparasitism).

Here, Liming took a look at the nuclear-encoded genes targeted to the mitochdonria (N-mt) genes, which are often ignored in similar studies on parasitic plants. Although the parasitic species had a complete component of genes encoded in their mitochondrial genomes (coming out soon in a companion paper), there was one parasitic group that lost a significant number of N-mt genes, especially in Complex I. See the left hand columns in Fig. 1 of the paper:

Despite this, we found that even these parasitic plants with unusual N-mt gene loss maintained proper mitochondrial respiration. Things like maximum respiration and Complex I driven respiration were similar between these parasitic species and non-parasitic relatives, although there was a lot of variation. However, there was a trend for parasitic species to rely more on OXPHOS complexes that were made up of entirely nuclear-encoded proteins – CII, AOX, and alternative NADHs. This was only statistically significant for CII, but we think it might indicate some shift in mitochondrial function in parasitic plants.

Check out the respiration data in Fig. 2 from the paper here:

See the paper for more of our thoughts, but this adds to a complex body of literature that’s emerging on parasitic plants and mitochondrial evolution/function. Some parasitic species seem to have drastic changes in their mtDNA-encoded proteins, others are fairly normal. Some have lost Complex I completely, others still have a fully-functional version. This is in contrast to the plastid genome, which is almost universally degraded across parasitic plants.

By taking a look at the N-mt genes in this interesting family, Liming has provided a new avenue for examining these awesome, weird plants.

Stay tuned to her for more research on parasitic plants and mitochdonria!