population genomics. evolution. bioinformatics.
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Our new study on the heritability and phenotypic plasiticity of body size in a parthenogenetic wasp (Dinocampus coccinellae) is now published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology! Here we designed an experiment with parthenogenetic lines of D. coccinellae presented with three different host ladybeetle species of varying sizes, across multiple generations to investigate heritability, and plasticity of body size measured via a combination of morphometric variables such as thorax width, abdominal width, and wing length in D. coccinellae. Our results indicate (1) little heritable variation in body size, (2) strong independence of offspring size on the host environment, (3) small mothers produce larger offspring, and vice versa, independent of host. We then model the evolution of size and host-shifting under a constrained fecundity advantage model of Cope’s Law using a Hidden Markov Model, showing that D. coccinellae likely has fitness advantages to maintain plasticity in body size despite parthenogenetic reproduction.
This work has been many years in the making, with all the reciprocal transplant experiments performed out of Alicia Tovar's garage through a year and a half of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A massive thank you and congratulations to everyone involved!
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We celebrated Darwin Day 2025 on February 12, 2025 by presenting our science! Thank you to everyone that joined us. Vikky (Sathvika Musuvathy) was recently awarded the 2025 Doris A. Howell Foundation – CSUBIOTECH Research Scholar Award for her project titled, "Predicting indicators of health using large genomic and phenotypic data." Congratulations to Vikky! We are so proud of her!
Margaret successfully defended her PhD thesis proposal and advanced to candidacy recently! Congratulations!
The Sethuraman Lab had a great time presenting our work at PAG32 at the Town and Country in San Diego! Arun gave a lecture in the Molecular Ecology workshop, while Tamsen presented her work on SpecKs at the polyploidy workshop. Until next year! Congratulations to Priyanshi Shah, who recently successfully defended her MS thesis, titled "Cataloging telomeric variation across diverse human populations, and its utility in predicting cancer using supervised machine learning"! Trevor Mugoya and Surangi Jayasinghe also successfully defended their MS theses proposals - congratulations!
Arun, Tamsen, and Priyanshi recently presented our lab's research at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution 2024 meetings in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico. And we got to do some fun sight-seeing, alongside all the great science!
The Sethuraman Lab, represented by Alex, Priyanshi, Raya, Tamsen and Trevor recently attended the 2024 SCalE Meeting, hosted by CalTech. Alex presented some of our recent research work on the genomic history of domestication in hops. Watch this space for our upcoming manuscript describing these results!
 Figure 1. Locations where sturgeon tissue samples were collected from presumed captive (red) and wild (purple) populations. Captive populations included three coastal fish markets in Batumi, Poti, and Tskaltsminda one inland fish market in Tbilisi, and an aquaculture facility. Wild populations were sampled from the Black Sea, Rioni River, and the mouth of the Rioni River. Our new collaborative study that examines genomic evidence for the presence of protected white sterlet, beluga, and stellate sturgeon in fish markets in Tbilisi, Georgia, often hybridizing with locally farmed sturgeons, led by Tamar Beridze, a visiting scholar in the Sethuraman lab in Fall 2022 is now published in Diversity! Read here.
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Arun Sethuraman
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