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Project Descriptions
Spring 2026

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Showing 4 projects out of 4 found. On page 1 out of 1.
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Genetic basis of climate adaptation and rapid evolution in plants

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The global climate is changing at an unprecedented rate due to human activities, threatening global biodiversity and food security. A fundamental question in evolutionary biology is: What enables or limits species to rapidly evolve and adapt to changing climates? In this project, we will use natural ecotypes of Arabidopsis to...

 Biological & Health Sciences

Exploring variation in the mutation spectrum across the plant kingdom

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Description: Spontaneous mutations fuel the rate of evolutionary change by increasing the amount of genetic variation across the green tree of life. Genetic variation is utilized within natural populations to improve fitness, therefore, knowledge of the historical bias of mutation rates and spectra across a genome and across populations will...

 Biological & Health Sciences

Linking Plant Traits and Genetic Diversity for Conservation.

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Why do some plants thrive while others face extinction? While the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) tracks species risk, they often overlook a critical factor: genetic diversity. Genetic diversity is the "fuel" for adaptation; without it, plants cannot evolve to survive climate change or new diseases. Our...

 Biological & Health Sciences

Open-source software development for conservation genomics

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

International conservation policies including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework now consider genetic diversity of wild species in their targets. However, scalable, theory-driven tools to assess and predict genetic diversity loss are still emerging, limiting their use in conservation planning. Analogous to the species-area relationship, recent work has...

 Biological & Health Sciences

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