About me:

I'm a researcher at Duke University, where I recently defended my PhD in the Noor Lab. I plan to begin postdoctoral research in Summer 2019 in the lab of Amy Goldberg.

As a geneticist and evolutionary biologist, I am intrigued by a broad array of scientific puzzles. My current projects are united by my interest in how new combinations of DNA are created, how certain combinations are maintained, and how these processes influence evolution. For more details on my dissertation research, read the synopsis below, or check out my short talk from The Allied Genetics Conference, 2016: How much do chromosomal inversions prevent gene conversion and interspecies gene flow?

Recombination and inversions:

One of my primary projects aims to understand how chromosomal inversions shape meiotic recombination, the process that shuffles combinations of alleles across loci. Inversions suppress recombination, but we don’t fully understand how and to what extent. Though single-crossover products are prevented within inversion heterozygotes, non-crossover gene conversion (and double crossovers) can still occur. By studying the frequency and distribution of non-crossover gene conversion in inversion heterozygotes, I hope to improve our understanding of how recombination acts alongside natural selection to influence genome evolution and speciation processes (Korunes & Noor 2017: doi:10.1111/mec.13736).

To better understand the recombination-barrier imposed by inversions, I examined rates of gene conversion in experimental crosses both within Drosophila pseudoobscura and between D. pseudoobscura and its naturally-hybridizing sister species D. persimilis. Through genome-wide empirical analyses of within species and in species hybrids, I observed that gene conversion rates in interspecies hybrids are at least as high as within-species estimates of gene conversion rates, and gene conversion occurs regularly within and around inverted regions of species hybrids, even near inversion breakpoints. This analysis is the first direct empirical assessment of gene conversion rates within inversions of a species hybrid, and these data show that gene conversion has the potential to reduce the efficacy of inversions as barriers to recombination over evolutionary time. For more details, see Korunes & Noor 2018 (doi.org/10.1111/mec.14921).

Linked selection:

Despite the shuffling of alleles via recombination, alleles at neighboring loci often remain non-randomly associated. This non-random association, or linkage-disequilibrium (LD), has evolutionarily important effects both within and between species. I study genetic diversity in Drosophila species with the goal of disentangling how different selective forces at a given locus can affect genetic diversity at neighboring linked loci. By understanding meiotic recombination and linked selection, I aim to address broader questions about how genetic diversity is created and maintained.