URAP

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Evolutionary transitions underlying phenotypic change are difficult to study because they often occur over millions of years. However, the fruit fly has a short generation time and a small genome that is well annotated and cheap to sequence. We used a large-scale experimental evolution approach to evolve toxin-sequestering...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Tarvin Lab studies how and why poison frogs don’t poison themselves. We aim to measure the effect of toxin consumption on frog health and chemical defenses through toxin feeding experiments paired with phenotypic assays (health monitoring, jumping challenges), chemical quantification (GCMS), and genomic assessment (RNA and DNA sequencing...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Amphibians -- frogs, salamanders, and caecilians -- exhibit a stunning variety of chemical defenses, ranging from antimicrobial peptides to antipredator neurotoxins and biological glues. Amphibian glues are the least-studied of these defenses. Additionally, the methods used to measure amphibian stickiness are not standardized, with some researchers gluing together beer cans to...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Poison frogs are known for their diverse array of colors and color patterning. The Tarvin Lab studies the genetics and diversity of color in Epipedobates poison frogs from Ecuador. Currently we are generating whole-genome resequencing data for >400 individual frogs that vary in their color from brown to bright...