I'm a first year genetics PhD student working with Dr. Andrea Sweigart to investigate the genetic basis of a common and strong plant hybridization barrier known as hybrid seed inviability. My goal is to uncover causal genes and gene regulatory mechanisms behind this hybridization barrier. For my research I will be using closely related species of Mimulus (Monkey Flowers). By using these species I also hope to find evolutionary patterns underlying hybrid seed inviability.

When a chromosome with two centromeres undergoes mitosis, this can create reciprocal duplications and deletions that can then lead to additional genome instability in subsequent rounds of cell division. This process, referred to as the breakage fusion bridge (BFB) cycle, has been traditionally difficult to study because cells engaged in the BFB cycle will exhibit variability in the exact nature of the genetic changes that result from breakage and fusion. The Dawe lab has developed an inducible centromere system that enables me to temporally control the BFB cycle, allowing me to study its direct impacts on structural variation, transposon activity, nucleotide modifications, and histone modifications. The findings of this project are expected to help elucidate mechanisms of genome evolution and genome instability in cancer genomes.