I have had a great group of students in the lab, at various academic levels. This list gives you an idea of what kinds of projects students have done and where some former students have gone on afterwards. If you are interested in joining the lab either, please have a look at the Research Page, especially the possible future directions, then click here.

Kyle Gardner (Ph.D., 2004)
Kyle recently defended his PhD. Kyle's thesis developed a set of Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) markers and created a genetic map of our wild oat cross. He then applied that map to the variation in phenotypic traits that he and others have been documenting across the recombinant in bred lines. The result was that Kyle was able to identify genes underlying performance in both the greenhouse and the field. Kyle has also been working on relating the patterns of genetic correlation measured in the crosses to co-localized QTL's (ie 'shared genes') underlying the traits. See The Wild Oats Project

April (Joey) Johansen (PhD., 2004)
Joey has also recently defended her thesis. She studied the short and long term consequences of hybrid exchange between separate genetic groups. Her project teased apart the contributions of heterosis (hybrid vigour) and epistasis (hybrid breakdown) to the fate of hybrids, and assesses the ability of novel recombinants to take on new ecological niches. See The Wild Oats Project. Joey has also investigated the patterns of seed exchange among the two populations of ponderosa pine on a fine scale at the point of contact. See The Montana Project.

Katy Schurman(B.Sc, 2006)
Katy studied the evolutionary costs and benefits of phenotypic plasticity. We knew from Joanna MacKenzie's project (below), that some oat lines could alter their root allocation in response to changing water availability more than others. Katy tested to see whether those that were more plastic were better able to maintain high performance over a range of environments, and whether this came at the cost of their ability to specialize in one environment.

Ben Stewart (B.Sc, 2006)
Ben used the QTL map derived by Kyle Gardner, in the early generation F2 hybrids. He examined hte AFLP DNA markers that flanked genes affecting fitness to try to distinguish heterozygotes from heterozygotes at the QTL. This information would allow us to test whether the QTL show dominance.

Melissa Morine (B.Sc, 2005)
Melissa's Honours project is to add Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RADP) markers to the map of the oat genome. The existing map is somewhat smaller than expected, possibly because parts of the genome are monomorphic. She is testing this idea by finding out whether RAPD markers fall into the same linkage blocks as the AFLPs. Melissa is currently doing a Master's Degree in Molecular Evolution.

Stephen Yorke (B.Sc, 2004)
Stephen won an NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Award to study the heritable variation in rooting patterns and relative growth rate among the F6 recombinants of The Wild Oats Project. These data will be used in conjunction with the map and the field data to locate the genes underlying these traits.

Joanna MacKenzie (B.Sc., 2003)
Joanna spent several summers in the lab studying the segregation of ecological traits among the early generation recombinant oats. Her honours project documented not only the segregation of the traits, but also gave the first estimates of the genetic correlations. Joanna went on to obtain an MSc from McGill, where she studied the evolutionary effects of mutation in Arabidopsis with Dan Schoen. See The Wild Oats Project

Sari Zeleneitz (B.Sc., 2003)
Sari worked on the chloroplast DNA of ponderosa pine, for her Honours project. She used cpDNA microsatellites to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between haplotypes from east and west of the contact zone and to ask whether there was evidence of a selective sweep or bottleneck. Sari is presently studying in the Master's program in Genetic Counselling at University of Toronto.

Mary Ellen Boudreau
Mary Ellen examined the pattern of microsattelite differentiation through the Montana secondary contact zone in Ponderosa pine for her Honours project. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Molecular Evolution with Ford Doolittle.

Angel Vats
Angel carried out an honors project in the greenhouse looking at the wild oats for differences in their ecological attributes. She went on to do field research on primates in Madagascar and Costa Rica, and recently obtained an MSc in Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

the lab group

A not-terribly-flattering picture of Me