David Lowry
About Me
I am a sixth year graduate student in the Duke University Program in Genetics and Genomics, who hails from the redwood empire and wine country of Northern California. I spent 4.5 years of long latte-drinking nights at UC Berkeley during the thrilling boom and crash of the dot-com era. After college, I set out to explore the finer delights of world cultures and wildlife before joining the grind of graduate school. Alas, my time at Duke has been good to me thanks to many fantastic people and my amazingly optimistic leader/advisor, Dr. Johh Willis.
The focus of my research is directed toward understanding the genetics of adaptation and speciation. To this end, I have chosen to study how divergent adaptation of the yellow monkey flower (Mimulus guttatus), to the coast versus inland habitat, contributes to reproductive isolation. I am using a combination of QTL mapping and candidate gene strategies to determine the genetic mechanisms that underlie the divergence of morphological and life-history traits between coast and inland Mimulus guttatus. Further, I have carried out reciprocal transplant experiments and population genetic analysis to demonstrate that coast and inland Mimulus are locally adapted and reproductively isolated. I am currently conducting a new reciprocal transplant experiment with near isogenic lines to test hypotheses of local adaptation and introgression between ecogeographic races. In addition, I am conducting genetic analysis of flowering time under different light conditions, anthocyanin production in vegetative tissues, and ion accumulation. I am also working on the assembly of the Mimulus guttatus genome.
Publications
Lowry, D. B. A brief history of local adaptation and 'stages in the evolution of plant species.' In prep
Lowry, D. B., C. Sheng, J.H. Willis. Genetics of variation in four vegetative anthocyanin phenotypes in Mimulus guttatus. In prep
Lowry, D. B., J. H. Willis. Chromosomal inversion linked to adaptive divergence and life-history shift of Mimulus guttatus ecological races. In prep
Lowry, D. B., S. R. Kirshenbaum. Fulfilling the promises of a transgenic future. Submitted
Hall M. C., D. B. Lowry, J. H. Willis. Multiple independent genetic loci control local adaptation in wild populations of Mimulus guttatus. In review
Lowry, D. B. (2010) Landscape evolutionary genomics. Biology Letters. In press
Important Things
- Contact Info: You can contact me at david.lowry@duke.edu.
- Make sure to check out the Mimulus Community.
Field Sites
- Boonville Inland Site
- Manchester Coastal Site
- Copperopolis
- Big Creek Reserve
- Bodega Marine Lab
- Angelo Reserve
- Botanical Beach
- Gwaii Haanas
- Bamfield Marine Science Center
- Pacific Rim National Park
Population Genetic Software
- TESS
- FSTAT
- Tassel
- Arlequin
- Structure
- GenGIS
- Mark Beaumont
- Geographic distance matrix generator
- Genepop (web)
- Dyerlab (Population Graphs)
- Isolation by Distance
- Genetic Data Analysis
- Software for Populaiton Genetic Analysis
- Ian Wilson (Batwing)
- Jody Hey (SITES)
- Structurama
- DNASP
- SNAP
Abiotic Stress Websites
Bioinformatic/Statistical Software and Resources
- Phytozome
- Bonferroni Correction Calculator
- Apollo
- sim4
- BLAT
- NCBI Trace Archives
- ClustalW
- Primer 3
- Q-Value calculator
Analysis of fitness data
Other useful sites
- Blank Outline Maps that can be used to make figures.