Lindsey Lab
Principal Investigator: Amelia Ryan Isis Lindsey
Institution: University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students
Research Focus
Project Summary Sexual reproduction evolved more than one billion years ago, shortly after the appearance of eukaryotes. Sex is theorized to be an important aspect of creating genetic variation, adapting to new environments, and in removing disadvantageous traits from the gene pool. Despite this, many eukaryotes have reverted to asexual reproductive strategies. Importantly, such transitions to asexual reproduction have huge evolutionary impacts: we see regular examples of this in the rapid spread of invasive, pathogenic, and drug-resistant organisms. Unfortunately, such transitions are notoriously difficult to mechanistically interrogate due to their lack of experimental tractability and the fact that many reversions to asexuality are quite ancient. However, arthropods are rich in recently acquired vertically inherited microbes (e.g., Wolbachia, Rickettsia, and Cardinium) that convert their arthropod hosts to asexual reproduction. So-called “parthenogenesis induction” has been reinvented multiple times across these bacteria and relies on microbial mechanisms for impacting host meiosis or mitosis to alter ploidy. We can manipulate these recently asexual lineages in the lab to mechan…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM150991-04: Causes and consequences of microbe-mediated asexuality (2026)
- 5R35GM150991-03: Causes and consequences of microbe-mediated asexuality (2025)
- 5R21AI175957-02: Mechanisms facilitating microbial co-inheritance (2025)
- 1R21AI175957-01A1: Mechanisms facilitating microbial co-inheritance (2024)
- 5R35GM150991-02: Causes and consequences of microbe-mediated asexuality (2024)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com