Achievement

All of our students have started working on research projects related to their thesis. Most are incorporating research started during their international semester in Panama with co-mentors from STRI. IGERT Fellow Beryl Jones spent the last semester on Barro Colorado Island in Panama collecting a bees species that varies in its social behavior. Specifically, she is using the facultatively social tropical bee, Megalopta genalis, to examine the genomic mechanisms that underly reproductive division of labor and the evolution of eusociality. By setting up artificial nest sites in the forest, she was able to collect larger samples of this bee which was previously thought to be too rare to be useful as a model organism for genetic or genomic work.