Recent Events

• Mark Margres gave a talk entitled "Population genomics and ecological diversification in North American venomous snakes" at the 34th Annual Gopher Tortoise Council Meeting in Bainbridge, GA October 4-6, 2012. Mark received the Best Student Presentation award for his talk.


• Dr. Rokyta, Emily Lemmon, and Alan Lemmon were awarded a three-year NSF grant entitled "Snake Venom Genomics and Evolution" to study the interspecific and intraspecific molecular evolution of snake venoms.


• Dr. Rokyta was awarded a five-year NIH grant for a project entitled "Pleiotropy, Epistasis, and the Biophysical Adaptation of ssDNA Bacteriophages."


• Mark Margres and Dr. Rokyta attended the 17th World Congress of the International Society on Toxinology in July (2012) in Honolulu, HI. Mark's poster "The venom-gland transcriptome of the eastern coral snake (Micrurus fulvius) reveals cryptic complexity in the intragenomic evolution of venoms" was awarded best poster by a young investigator.


• Mark Margres joined the lab as a new graduate student in August 2011.


• Dr. Rokyta, Andrew Sackman, Victoria Pearson and Brian Caudle attended the Gordon Research Conference on Microbial Population Biology. Andrew, Victoria and Brian all presented research during the poster sessions.


• A new manuscript coauthored by Dr. Rokyta and Brian Caudle entitled "Epistasis between beneficial mutations and the phenotype-to-fitness map for a ssDNA virus" appeared in PLos Genetics


• A new manuscript coauthored by Dr. Rokyta and Brian Caudle entitled "A high-throughput venom-gland transcriptome for the eastern diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus adamanteus) and evidence for pervasive positive selection across toxin classes" appeared in Toxicon.


• Andrew Sackman joined the lab as a gradute student in August 2010


• Victoria Pearson joined the lab as a graduate student in 2010.


• Brian Caudle joined the lab as a graduate student in January 2010.


• Danielle Reed has been awarded the Charles M. McAllister Scholarship Award in the Department of Biological Science at FSU for 2009-2010.