Department of Integrative Biology
Study Reveals How Avocados Reverse Sexes Throughout the Day
Postdoctoral fellow Jeffrey Groh led a study on the genetic explanation of avocado pollination. All avocado trees are hermaphrodites, but until now, it was unclear how avocado flowers function as female in the morning and male in the afternoon (A-type plants), while B-type plants follow the opposite pattern. Read the full story in UC Davis News.
North and South America weren't always connected, but their mammals still found a way to intermingle
IB professor Jack Tseng, former IB undergrad Leah Kahn, former visiting postdoctoral scholar Adolfo Pacheco-Castro, and collaborators at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and the National Autonomous University of Mexico documented fossil evidence indicating that animals from different latitudes of North and South America intermingled before the formation of the Panamanian land bridge, which linked the two continents. Read the full story in Berkeley News.
Performance trade-offs define a fundamental dental dichotomy in mammals
Led by FAVE Lab NSF/Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow Narimane Chatar, alongside Huelsenbeck Lab PhD student Levi Raskin, former IB visiting scholars Alex Ramos and Melvin Vankelst, and IB professor Jack Tseng, the team published a paper on mammalian dental evolution. Read the full story, featured as the cover article in Science.
New fossils upend catastrophist narrative that flowering plants flourished only after dinosaur extinction
IB professor Cindy Looy, grad student Jaemin Lee, former doctoral student Dori Contreras, and former undergrad student James Saulsbury reported that Dori's Tuff flora contained large fruits from flowering trees, suggesting that animals were eating larger seeds produced by angiosperms 75 million years ago. Read the full story in Berkeley News.
Newly identified fossil sheds light on evolutionary history of saber-toothed cats
Postdoctoral fellow Narimane Chatar is researching carnivore molars in the lab of IB professor Jack Tseng. Chatar discovers the cranial and mandibular remains of Adelphailurus kansensis and compares them to Smilodon, the most recognizable saber-toothed cat. Read the full story in Berkeley News.
IB faculty and doctoral student receive W.M. Keck Foundation grant
IB Professor Peter Sudmant, a genome scientist and expert in computational biology, and Ph.D. candidate Michael Singer are researching the "extreme" immune systems of bats through long-read sequencing which provides data for predicting and preventing future bat-borne viral transmission to human populations. The grant will support faculty and their graduate student collaborators to maintain progress on high-risk, high-impact work. Read the full story in Berkeley Inspire.
IB alum's research on cover of Nature
Laura Alexander, IB PhD 2025, made the cover of Nature Health as a co-first author on her major study entitled "Ecological and demographic drivers of Oropouche virus transmission". Read the full article here.
Scientists split gentoo penguins into four species, one totally new to science. Three of them are already threatened.
A new study co-led by IB Professor Rauri Bowie utilizes advanced genomics to split the gentoo penguin into four separate species—marking the first new penguin species identified in over 100 years. Read the full article in Berkeley News.
Nielsen wins Guggenheim Fellowship
Professor Rasmus Nielsen is a winner of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship this year. His laboratory works on the development and application of statistical and computational methods for analyzing genomic data in the context of evolutionary genetics, population genetics and medical genetics. Read the announcement in the Berkeley News.