Graduate Student - Josie Reinhardt, BA Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, '05

Began at UNC Fall of 2006

Currently I am working on projects in both Drosophila and a bacterial plant pathogen, Pseudomonas syringae.

My work in Drosophila focuses on the evolution of novelty and gene regulation. I am investigating a class of genes that have no known homologs in Drosophila outside of D. melanogaster and D. simulans. I am currently working to determine what phenotype might be associated with a knockdown of a subset of these newly arisen (de Novo) genes.

In association with the lab of Dr. Jeff Dangl, I am working on a project in bacterial comparative genomics. I am developing bioinformatics tools for de Novo sequencing and assembly of multiple strains of P. syringae, each of which infects a different host crop plant. This approach gives us the tools to ask both broad (pangenomic) and specific (evolution of certain genes) questions about the (co) evolution of pathogenicity in these bacteria.