welcome to week 7 of the IntroDUCKtion
2020 faculty perspective series
today's roundup of faculty talks is
featuring faculty from the school of
journalism and communication
the department of indigenous race and
ethnic studies the department of earth
sciences
the department of cinema studies and the
department of biology
in a moment i will turn the program over
to our presenter Dr. Bill Cresko
before that though i'm going to review a
few things that are important to keeping
you on track to complete introduction
all students watching this program
should make time to submit your
reflection of the session
as soon as we're done here this
afternoon you can do that at
community.uoregon.edu
your reflections on the individual
faculty perspectives programs don't have
to be long
but we do want you to share what you've
learned generally speaking taking time
to reflect in this way is a proven way
to improve your retention of material
and is a habit of tons of successful
students
if you're a student who wants to earn a
credit as part of your introduction
experience
you need to select all of the faculty
perspectives within two full tracks
plus four additional talks and submit
reflections on all
twenty you'll also need to submit a
longer capstone reflection on the
entirety of the programs that you've
watched
finally for you students who are
watching in zoom remember that our
faculty members are answering your
questions live in the last segment of
each of these programs
students if you're watching live you
should use the q a feature at the bottom
of your zoom screen
to ask questions of our presenter here
this afternoon
all right i'm going to stop talking and
introduce you to Dr. Bill Cresko
Professor of Biology who will explore
how quickly organisms can adapt to new
environments
in this week's innovation and
entrepreneurship track
welcome Dr. Cresko great thank you Cora
it's a real pleasure to be here today
and uh
to actually welcome our next and newest
members of our flock to campus and
very soon we'll be able to flock in
person but for the time being we'll just
do it electronically for a little while
and as Cora mentioned
in her introduction i'm here to tell
you a little bit about
some of the work that we do in my
laboratory and other researchers at the
university of oregon
on asking questions about adaptation in
natural populations
and you'll see on the on the slide in
front of you that there are pictures of
a fish in a lake and those will become
clear in a second
why those are there but let me just
start off by
saying a little bit more about the
laboratory so what is a laboratory
at the University of Oregon or many uh
places
well it's a physical space it's
a set of tools and techniques and pieces
of equipment
but more than anything else it's
actually the people in the laboratory so
our lab and many labs at the U of O
only run on the excitement and the
energy of the people who come and
and work with us on our research and one
of the key things that i think
differentiates the University of Oregon
from many places is that
undergraduates are really a key
lifeblood of research in laboratories
so this is just a subset of
undergraduates have worked in our
laboratory
over the last decade since I came to
the University of Oregon
and many of these people have gone on to
careers in academics and government in
the private industry
but all of them played key roles in
doing real work and real science in the
lab so my talk today is actually going
to
highlight some key entrepreneur and
innovation that's happened
through undergraduate researchers in the
lab
many of whom did their honors theses so
this is something to
to consider that many of you might be
able to come and work
in a laboratory work with a faculty
member
graduate students or postdoctoral
scholars to actually not only
take courses and get credit but to do an
honors thesis
and so here's a set over the last four
years of
honors college, clark honors college,
thesis students and biology thesis
students in
in my laboratory so Starla Chambrose is
still
a student in my lab, Jack Peplinski and
Emily Niebergall
just graduated last year as did Jared
Galloway
and John Crandall, Taylor Wilson uh
graduated a couple of years before
and Katie Ituarte and Sophie Sichel
and i'd just like to point out that
among these
students who i'm showing you here they
together with us have published a total
of
over 10 papers/manuscripts in
peer-reviewed journals and have done
really amazing things and i just give a
couple examples of Emily Niebergall who
is one of our three Goldwater Scholars
last year at the University of Oregon
John Crandall who graduated and is now
in his PHD program at the University of
Wisconsin
laboratory in genetics Taylor Wilson who
wanted to go to vet school
and ended up at one of the best in the
world tufts and then Katie Ituarte
who ended up going to the Cleveland
Clinic one of only 32 students
and now is actually a resident at
Harvard at Bath Deaconess
after becoming a first generation
student from a Latinx family in new
Mexico
so being a researcher in a laboratory
allows you
to do great things and more importantly
to really
expand your mind to ask amazing
questions like
how do organisms adapt to normal
conditions well in some cases organisms
adapt to novel conditions
by changing immediately their physiology
all of us sweat when it gets warm we
actually then
get shiver when it gets cold but really
the questions in my lab have to do
with the diversity of life that has to
do with genetic changes or the changes
in the dna that occur
in the genomes or the entire compendium
of genetic material in organisms so
a fundamental question that's fascinated
not only biologists but humans is how
did this diversity of life arise
what are the processes that actually
occur by natural selection
changes in local population sizes but
more
importantly what's been happening at the
level of dna sequence
and that question has been very
difficult to answer
up until just a few years ago and part
of the reason is that
for example in the genomes of our body
each one of our cells
has three billion base pairs of dna so
try to think about
if each one of those base pairs was
actually a book in a library that would
be a thousand libraries of congress
unbelievable amounts of information to
actually sort through
and to figure out so what we in my
laboratory and many other researchers do
is we focus
in on model systems and those model
systems or groups of organisms that we
study
we do so for a variety of reasons you
may have heard talks about or
done research or learned about things
like
fruit flies which are really good for
genetics in the laboratory
or nematode worms that are really
workhorses for understanding
how neurons in the brain work the
laboratory the organism we use in the
laboratory for a lot of our studies is
this small fish called the three spine
stickleback or Gasterosteus Aceleatus
this fish is actually really interesting
because it lives in
coastal habitats around the northern
hemisphere i'm just showing north
america right here at the height of the
last glacial maximum
but if you go for example when i leave
the
the redwood ballroom that i'm in now and
go outside if i were to walk across
franklin boulevard i could see
stickleback swimming around in the
middle race right next to the Willamette
river
in many of these regions of the northern
hemisphere that were glaciated
18 to 20 000 years ago as glaciers
receded
new habitats opened up such as that one
that's shown in the lower right hand
corner and one of the first
organisms that invades is a marine form
of three spine stickleback
and what's happened afterwards is an
amazing
explosion of diversity so this is just a
whole bunch of pictures from a review
paper from uh
20 years ago that just shows pictures of
the male nuptial coloration so these are
the colors that the males take on when
they're
build nests on the bottom of lakes and
try to court females to convince them
to to come into the lakes or to come
into the nest
lay their eggs and then the males will
take care of them
so each one of these pictures shows you
pairs of stickleback that exist in
closely
connected habitats some in which the
males turn bright red
some where they turn jet black some that
get
more orangey some that get blue and
that's just
one of the many different
characteristics or traits or the term
that biologists use
phenotypes that changes in this organism
and they happen quite rapidly
so as i mentioned many of these fish
live in habitats
that were deglaciated at over the last
13 to 14
000 years and one of the key changes
that's occurred
is in the bony armor uh the latin name
gastrostacy couliotis
means spine belly bone so you'll notice
that what i'm labeling here is the
pelvic structure
is modified pelvic fins of the fish so
if we actually think about
say a salmon or a trout they'll have
pectoral fins and pelvic fins
that's a modified defensive structure
it additionally the lateral plates down
the side are a bony armor
not too different than say chain mail
for if you could think of
from knights and armor and these
structures have evolved because these
small fish get eaten quite a bit
by larger fish or in the bottom that's a
picture of a dragonfly niad that will
actually grab on to the
to the fish and try to eat them and so
it's been shown that that
those uh armor structures help these
fish survive
but they're very expensive to make
energetically including
trying they have to eat more and they
have to
live in the right habitats that have
enough calcium and other minerals
and that comes at the expense of
reproduction so there's always a
trade-off in allocation to
the creation of those structures and
then not creating those
and re-routing that energy to to
reproduction
so work on this organism for years has
really laid out its its
understanding of its ecology behavioral
changes that are really
quite um striking differences in
morphology which is the
for example the the size and shape of
the bones
and when i started on this this work
about 15 years ago a big question for me
was
what's going on inside the genome what
genes are actually changing
what dna sequences are evolving and
at that time when we started there
really wasn't an ability to answer this
question
and so i and one of my colleagues at uh
Eric Johnson who's also a faculty member
in the biology department
were new fact that we both had just
opened our laboratories at the
University of Oregon
and at that time in the mid-2000s there
was a revolution
occurring in a type of sequencing
technology called next generation
sequencing technology
and Eric and i quickly realized that
there might be a way for us to go
through
and harness that sequencing technology
to create
a new uh genomic scanning technology
that was much faster cheaper and more
efficient
than anything that come before so it's
actually we don't have quite enough time
to go through
what i'm showing you on the slide here
on the upper left hand corner
but suffice it to say it's a
representation of the ability to look at
thousands and if not millions of
locations in the genome
and down below i i present two
manuscripts or papers that pub
we publish that describe this technology
and i do that because it's really
important to note
that the two the two folks on the bottom
mike miller and joe dunham
who were key first authors on these
papers who helped us
were both undergraduates at the time so
they were actually
undergraduate researchers who helped us
and others develop this new
innovative technology so what can you
actually do with something like this
well
this actually led us to the ability to
go through and ask some really
interesting questions
and one of these was a question that i
and one of my colleagues frank von
hippel who's in the upper right hand
corner of this slide
here who's who was at that time a
faculty member at the University of
Anchorage uh
University of Alaska Anchorage Frank and
I are
long long-term collaborators and
actually ends up that his uncle pete von
hippel is a faculty member at the
University of Oregon and chemistry
department and a world famous chemist we
asked this question
about a very interesting set of islands
in Alaska
that we know a lot about and i'll tell
you more about those in a second
and to help us study this we we pulled
in
a set of researchers emily lessick who
is a graduate student
an undergraduate then a graduate student
at the university of alaska anchorage
Mary Sherbick who is an undergraduate
researcher who is also an alaskan native
first generation
researcher at the university of alaska
John Crandall
in my laboratory at the u of o and
Taylor Wilson along with several of our
graduate students and postdocs
and this is just one example of a paper
in a journal that's called the
proceedings of the national academy of
science where we first described
the genomic changes or changes in the
dna that were occurring
in these special populations so what's
so special about them
this is the the part that was really
exciting to me
is that in contrast to a lot of natural
uh exploration of natural changes uh in
a college and evolution where we might
not have an exact idea of when
the glaciers receded and opened up new
habitats
in this case we do it actually happened
on march
27 1964. the largest earthquake in the
northern hemisphere the second largest
ever recorded
happened in south central alaska and so
that's a picture of the um
uh beginning of the aleutian peninsula
there anchorage would be kind of in the
middle of that picture on the left
and then the images on the right are
downtown anchorage where people went
into stores and shops
before the earthquake hit and then when
they came out they realized that their
cars were
eight to ten feet below where they were
before they were in buildings looking
out at the second
at a street that before would had been
two floors below and was now a
floor above and this earthquake was so
massive a good way to to
compare this is the loma prieta
earthquake that happened in california
in the late 1980s
was about a this earth the earthquake in
alaska was about a thousand times
stronger than that one
so what did it do well it actually did a
lot of things it destroyed
houses and knocked down buildings but it
also created new land
almost instantaneously and there were
series of islands on which this happened
and that new land uh on which these
islands were
the islands on which this new land was
created were way
out in the gulf of alaska and they were
way away from
other mainland populations of freshwater
forms of stickleback and the only ones
that were out there were oceanic forms
so what i'm showing you on the picture
here is images
from this island uh one island out here
called middleton island
before and after the earthquake and
interestingly many of these islands
weren't inhabited
but we actually knew a lot about them
because of the
strategic positioning of these during
the cold war actually not too far from
from russia
so when you're looking at the box on the
on
the left that's uh on the island the
picture of the island in 2008
you can see that it's encompassing parts
of what were the old island before the
earthquake
and that new terrace that was created
afterwards and if you look closely on
that new terrace
you can see all these little ponds
they're not very big
but when frank and his team started to
explore them he realized that
they weren't saltwater they were
freshwater ponds now
these aren't spring fed but there's a
lot of rain in this part of alaska so it
didn't take very long
for these these small indentations that
were created to be filled up with fresh
water
they're intermittently connected to the
ocean so they had access
from their access to these ponds was
available to oceanic forms of
stickleback the ones that i showed you
before with the
the really robust armor and what ended
up happening is
when uh frank and his students and we
went out
to middleton and other islands in the
region one called danger there's another
one called montague
and it was quite a trip so it's a long
it's
hundreds of miles out there you have to
actually take planes and helicopters
put traps out in the field and in the
upper right hand corner
you can see just on the hand of
one of the undergraduate researchers
pictures of those stickleback
the top two are the tradition or the
oceanic form
and the bottom two looked a lot like
freshwater stickleback despite the fact
that there was no documentation of
freshwater stickleback on that island
before the earthquake uh except in one
small location
and so we asked the the question then
what how did this happen is this a
situation in which
that these fish have actually evolved
over the last
30 to 40 years so instead of thinking
about evolution happening on the order
of millions of years or thousands of
years
could it actually be happening over
human life's
lifespan and so what we did is we went
through and we did a whole bunch of
phenotypic characterization meaning
looking at the traits like how big the
eye
is the size of the oprical which is uh
marked by that number four right there
which indicates what type of food that
they're eating how much of that armor
they had
and we found that when you examined at
the phenotypic level
the stickleback that were in the ocean
and in freshwater
they were very uh similar to the ocean
and freshwater divergence that we had
seen previously that we thought took
thousands of years
so the question was did these fish
actually evolve over
50 years or fewer to do that we went
through and used that
rad genotyping technique that we had
developed earlier
and scanned through the genomes of over
a thousand fish
to look at what was actually going on so
we went to different habitats on three
different lakes
danger montague and middleton and looked
at
numerous different populations that only
had fish that were low-plated or didn't
have much of that armor
completely plated some that lived in
freshwater habitats
some that lived in ocean habitats and
the upshot is
that yes we could actually confirm
genetically
that these populations evolved
independently
at least seven different times if not
more on each one of these
in total across these islands and did so
in ways in which the genome changed
only in parts of the regions of the
genome that were important for
adaptation to that new
different environment whereas the rest
of the genome didn't change at all
and i'll show you what that looks like
across the genome it's pretty hard to
look at the whole genome of stickleback
fish because it's 500 million base pairs
but we actually have a representation
that will actually help you think about
it a little bit
but before we do i just want to point
out that that not only
did these three islands get uplifted
were they uplifted during that
earthquake
there were hundreds of other locations
where this was likely happening
over and over again so what i'm showing
you here it's a little confusing but
on the left i'll try to talk you through
it the left side
of the image is just those three islands
again
and the color coding is what we
described as different groups of
populations that likely evolved
independently
and on the right is a circle diagram
from the inside out
that shows the entire 21 chromosomes of
the stickleback genome
500 million base pairs separated into
each one of those 21 chromosomes so just
like
we have 23 chromosomes stickleback have
21 chromosomes
so as you're moving along there green
means there's no difference when you
look at the ocean
versus one ocean population versus
something else and each
row from the inside out is a comparison
between
a marine or an oceanic stickleback and
something else so the first
circle is one marine population on one
island and another marine population on
another island
so what that means is that you see that
everything's green
that makes sense because the fish in the
ocean swim back and forth
they interbreed they actually exchange
genes
or variants called alleles and they just
move and swim back and forth so we see
very little differences
on that inner circle but as you move
outwards
and the second circle from the middle
the third the fourth
everywhere where you see red
right there indicates locations where
there's
much greater difference between the
freshwater part of the genome and the
ocean part of the genome
than occurs in other parts of the genome
like here
so for example when you look in
chromosomes 14
15 16 and 17 as i've circled on this
most of those sections are green or
slightly yellow meaning that they're
a little bit different but not very much
whereas these parts of the genome
where it's red means they're very
different they're actually so different
that they're about the same level of
divergence
between the ocean and freshwater
stickleback as you would find sometimes
between different species
and again this has happened in 45 to 50
years
so to finish up on this slide each of
those
rings from two the second ring the third
ring the fourth ring the fifth ring and
the sixth ring
are different pop freshwater populations
that evolved in 50 years on
three different islands that are dozens
of miles away from each other
separated by the ocean and the
freshwater fish can't survive in the
ocean
so this must have happened independently
but you'll notice it's not
random with respect to the genome in one
population where you see a change
you also see that change in another
population for example on
linkage group four which is
approximately around 230
on the if you were if this were a clock
you can see
that those same regions over and over
again change linkage group 7 which is
around
it's in the lower right hand side same
thing leakage group
11 and 2021 which is right up at the top
which looks like around midnight
previously we had shown that these are
the places in the genome
where genetic variants were segregating
meaning they were in the population that
were linked to changes in the phenotype
uh that are the divergence between ocean
and
so that was really cool but we want to
know why it was the same regions over
and over again
and what john crandall for his
undergraduate thesis did
is he said you know i bet if we were to
take oceanic
and freshwater stickleback including
freshwater stickleback that we combined
with a marine stickleback and made a
hybrid and then cross those back what
we'd actually find
is that there would be some genetic
incompatibilities that would lead to a
reduction
in the recombination what is called the
recombination rate
or the turning over and the connections
of the genes
making it easier for cassettes of the
genome to actually
adapt in fresh water
so john made these crosses and he did it
in the laboratory and that's another
benefit of this organism is we can
go out into the field and bring them
into the laboratory and we've actually
established
laboratory lines of stickleback from all
over oregon
now that we use in the laboratory to do
crosses and actually genetically modify
their genomes and when he did that what
he actually found was something quite
amazing
so instead of showing all 21 of the
the linkage groups or the chromosomes of
stickleback we're just focusing in on
one of these
linkage group 21 so i'm just going to go
back a couple slides and linkage group
21 is that one that's right at the top
almost at midnight on on this clock and
you can see those
red lines that occur repeatedly on each
one of those
so when we look at that those red lines
now represent that middle part of the
chromosome
and what's interesting about that middle
part of the chromosome there
where it's very red as compared to the
blue regions that's the greatest
level of divergence so that that figure
right there actually represents
fst which is a measure of divergence
within as compared to between
so when you're closer to zero there's
very little difference when you're
closer to one
there's a lot of divergence there and
just to put that into perspective when
we think of all the human
global human genetic diversity are the
fst values are almost all
uh just around zero nothing no nowhere
close to
anything as you see as diverse as is
what's here
so what john did is he actually made
what are called genetic
maps and those genetic maps then are
using linked markers that segregate
different ways depending upon which
genomes are combined together so if we
think about
making different hybrids of horses and
donkeys to create mules you have
different
changes in how that how the parts of the
genome move with respect to one another
and what he found is that in the crosses
where there were just the freshwater
genome represented by that
blue representation of the stickleback
right under the
the sign that says or the the label that
says genetic maps
they actually look pretty much the same
they actually go one to one
and then when you looked at the red
stickleback which is just the ocean and
ocean genomes together
pretty much the same distance but it was
flipped and that was a key thing because
aha that actually indicates that this is
something called an inversion
where in one part of one genome of an
organism it's in one orientation
but in this case two million base pairs
of dna had been flipped over
and what john found is then when you
bring together those two genomes
that recombination rate over that two
million base pairs
goes from a significant amount to
nothing
so that's what the bottom row is showing
how all of those genetic markers those
rad genetic markers
go to zero and so this research was
was really exciting to us and it was
exciting to a lot of people
in the world and john actually is a
co-author um
just a few months ago in a uh on a paper
in the um the journal genetics which is
one of the
premier journals in the in the field of
genetics
so that wasn't even though i only showed
you linkage group 21
or chromosome 21 what it actually ends
up is that
the physical genome or the complete
number of base pairs the 500 million
base pairs
of those regions that show the greatest
amount of divergence
that accounts for about 20 percent of
the genetic map
but all of those regions across the um
sorry 20 of the physical map or the
entire dna sequence
all of those regions showed the same
pattern all of them
when you actually had the hybrid or
combination of fish together they shrunk
down
meaning that even though those parts of
the genome that needed to be moved from
ocean into fresh water and had to do so
very quickly
it wasn't too hard to do once
hybridization between ocean and
freshwater forms started to happen
because
they actually became smaller units that
actually could be changed in frequency
quite quickly and i didn't have time to
tell you about it today but one of the
the folks that i mentioned earlier on in
the slide
Taylor Wilson did very similar work on
oregon populations and found similar
patterns
and then jared galloway actually was a
computer science undergraduate major who
worked with
faculty member peter ralph and myself
and actually developed a new modeling
tech
technology and approach here where he
was able to go through
and reconstruct what was happening in in
the wild that we saw from our data
in silico meaning in computer programs
and that paper was just published a few
months ago as well too
so in summary to get at this question of
how do organisms adapt to novel
conditions it's going to take many many
years of research
over many laboratories for long periods
of time i don't want to pretend like
the answers that i'm giving here today
are the complete answers even just for
stickleback which is just one of the
millions of different organisms
and it's only for questions at the
genetic level let alone these diversity
of questions about
at the ecological and behavioral levels
that are so fascinating but the fun
thing is
you all have your lives ahead of you if
this is something that's interesting to
you
not only i but many others at the
university of oregon
have really fundamental uh deep
questions about this whether it's
Kirsten Sterner and Nelson Ting's
research and
in the department of anthropology on
non-human primates and the evolution of
zoonotic viruses well like SARS COV2 the
virus that causes COVID-19
or if you're interested in studying how
host and microbes interact with one
another and evolve
you might want to check out research
from karen gilliman
or brendan bohannon or judith eisen
who's very interested in how that
the microbes interact with development
to affect how organisms actually behave
but all of these things are available to
you and
at the university of oregon and even if
we can't be in person
quite yet a lot of this work can
actually be done at a distance so don't
hesitate
don't be afraid just reach out because i
spend a lot of days and a lot of my time
in boring meetings
one of the things i love to do is get an
email from somebody who's interested in
the work that we or others are going to
do that's what we love to do
and we'd love to hear from you so i'm
looking forward to
seeing you in in person to help answer
some of these
questions and so just to summarize the
talk from today
some organisms can rapidly move and
adapt to different habitats like we
showed for stickleback
but what we found is that to do so they
have what's called pre-existing genetic
variation or standing genetic variation
that exists in ocean populations that
can be
rapidly moved so the ability to do this
in organisms like stickleback might help
some species for example respond to
things like global climate change
but it varies from organism to organism
and it really matters whether the
organism like the stickleback where
there's
hundreds of thousands or millions of
them have
standing genetic variation or whether
we're talking about a very small
population that's confined to a region
on
say a on a the tip of a
top of a mountain where it really isn't
much genetic diversity and really not
much not many places to go so those
organisms may not be able to adapt
and these new technologies like the one
that eric johnson myself and
and our and our students have developed
can help us read the
genome like never before and in our
genomes are written
and when i say we i mean all of
organisms on the planet the history of
life it's amazing to think about the
fact
that all dna that exists in our bodies
right now can be traced
backwards in time to the same piece of
dna that exists in one of our ancestors
they're different people
but they can all be traced back through
time and all organisms
that you see around you have genomes
that can be read in this way to answer
amazing questions
so the stuff of life is written in in
genomes
so with that i just want to thank you
for listening it was really fun to come
and talk science today
and i want to acknowledge this is a a
few years old some of the members of the
laboratory
chose this picture because many of these
are undergraduate students some of whom
i mentioned
others who are actually off in the world
for example cat milligan myrie in the
upper right hand corner
there is a postdoctoral was a
postdoctoral scholar with karen gillan
myself and is now a faculty member at
the university of connecticut
julian catchen at the university of
illinois many of those the
undergraduate students actually makes me
a little sad to look through this
picture and
know that they've all grown up and gone
off and many of them have gone off in
the world
so we're ready for for the for the next
uh
group of ducks to come in and do work in
the in our laboratory
and special thanks to my mentors uh when
i was an undergraduate neil shubin
um at the uh was the first person who
took me under his
wing and taught me all about the
fascination of
biology and my phd advisor susan foster
john baker
and at the university of oregon special
mentors john postawatt and chuck kimmel
so i want to thank them and with that
i'm happy to to take questions thanks
thank you so much
we do have questions for you um and
actually i wanted to start off with
because i can ask the questions first um
i
i was thinking uh as i listened to you
talk about
jared who's a computer science major um
working with you um are there other
students who
who aren't biology majors or or
um you know the traditional majors that
you might find in
your lab like how many other kinds of
majors have you
mentored or supervised within the work
that you do
yeah one of the the fascinating things
to me is how the U of O and being a
comprehensive research and
deep liberal arts education institution
is it
it actually many of the students are
coming from
diverse diverse degrees and majors
so for example kate a torta
had dual degrees in french in biology as
well too
computer science and sorry i'm looking
up it's math,
anthropology, russian literature,
a variety of different backgrounds so no
doing work in a laboratory and being
interested in research
not only is it not that it should be
confined i actually find that
to natural sciences but i actually find
that
uh the undergraduate researchers in the
laboratory who have these diverse
experiences
um and uh interest and and degrees
actually can put pieces together in very
different ways than than
than well those of us who have been
around for a little bit longer
thank you for that um ryan wants to know
um what determines how fast an organism
can
evolve and are there ways to help humans
evolve and adapt to new environments
faster
yeah so um that's actually a really
important question that
it's not answered yet so what is it that
allows some organisms to adapt quickly
and other organisms not
we do have some hints about uh
from research like mine and and in our
laboratories and others
which it has to do with genetic
variation
that exist already in populations so if
that genetic variation can be
utilized then changes can happen more
quickly
another good example is domesticated
dogs
so if we think about i myself have a
siberian husky
at home and siberian huskies look kind
of like wolves but not exactly
but chihuahuas don't nor do great danes
and so
most of those differences among breeds
of dog that were
have evolved under artificial selection
happen because of the use of existing
genetic variation and not new mutations
that actually occurred
so in terms of the human evolution
humans are have evolved and are evolving
and will continue to evolve
but frankly many of the changes that
we're facing
uh on the planet are things that uh in
terms of responses
have to do with not evolution but with
using our resources wisely
actually uh collaborating working with
one another and
um and sort of doing the things that we
know that we need to do
so responding to the the changes that
are actually happening on the planet um
with respect to humans i first would
look to all the other disciplines and
degrees
uh that and that are out there that that
before i would think about human
evolution as a part of the solution
thank you for that um another question
that we have here um
were your findings of such of pardon me
i'm going to start over was your finding
of such genetic change surprising to you
has your research impacted other
research done by different folks
yeah so it was surprising in some ways
one thing that wasn't surprising was
that we predicted
that it really had to be existing
genetic variation that was being
repurposed
what was surprising about that is that
that we predicted and
and i predicted that it would be a lot
more of the genome that there would be a
lot
more complex patterns of different genes
different alleles or genetic variants
but it ended up being
kind of more of a simpler pattern fewer
of those genes
being utilized over and over again and
in some ways
that actually links to the previous
question because
it may mean that one of the interesting
conundrums is even though there are
millions of stickleback populations
around the world
there aren't that many species of
stickleback there actually
are only a few of them they haven't
radiated into different species like say
the 2000 or so
different african cichlid fishes so it
may be
that the simple genetic architecture or
the genetic combination allows rapid
evolution so far
but then makes it difficult to move much
further so our research
and much of the research of the
undergraduates have worked in the
laboratory
have actually impacted
researchers around the world and if you
look at the papers they end up getting
cited meaning other researchers from
everywhere around the world look at
those and and use them as a guide
for the work that they're doing but also
conceptually too to think about
how fast evolution can can happen i'd
say that i think we've
we've played a role in that which which
has been
nice thank you
um okay so this is this is a great one
um are there
um some specific courses in your
department you'd recommend for
non-science majors to
improve our science literacy
yeah so in biology there are a number of
intro courses at the 100 level
that are really exciting and and are fun
courses to take
and so i can think of several of them
off the top of my head right now
so there's a there's an intro to human
genetics that's offered actually by the
head of our department bruce bauerman
that's a really fun course to take
there's courses that are introductions
to ecology
introductions to evolution and one of
them
is professor alan kelly who's uh
he's one of our um star uh faculty at
the U of O
uh in in particular with teaching a
number of different classes
that have to do with cancer biology so
he teaches a
course at the 100 level an introduction
to cancer biology
which i think would be really
fascinating for for students to take
and similar to our department there are
many other departments
that that offer such courses for example
human physiology chemistry but
anthropology as well too
geography earth sciences many different
departments
and a new one that is just starting this
fall that
one of my other roles is the executive
director of the data science initiative
we have a new degree in undergraduate
degree in data science
and this coming winter for the first
time
we will be teaching the first of two
courses at the
that's called the introduction to data
science so the use of data and big data
to answer questions
and that one is really geared towards
students who are interested in
just the basics of data science so that
might be a good one to take
i was going to ask you about that that
new role of yours
how did that evolve in and why is a
biology professor
helping shape the data science degree
program
at the u of o yeah that's a really good
question because data sciences
can be described and thought different
as different ways by different people
but there is a core there
and that's uh that that in general folks
think about data science as being the
harnessing of large amounts of data or
big data and by that we mean
there's a lot of it it's really variable
it's coming at you really fast
and you're not sure which data to trust
and then the other aspect of it is the
use of advanced technology
for analyzing it that might be
statistical tests
or machine learning approaches in
computer science
so the third that's two of the key
things the third key thing about it is
that
in contrast to computer science or
applied mathematics where
those fields are really focused on the
aspects of computer science and
and applied math almost completely
the questions in data science or the
focus is almost always on
applications to some other domain like
in chemistry
or in linguistics where people are
really interested in studying entire
tomes for corpus linguistics or in
biology
when you create a new genomic technology
and realize
that you've just created more genetic
data than existed
before 1990 and realized you didn't have
any idea how to analyze it and you
really needed to work with computer
scientists
and become one yourself to figure out
data scientists
to actually develop new tools on the
computational side and so a big part of
our research in our laboratory has
actually been
developing the data analytic tools for
the technologies that are developed
so even things like brain scans from an
FMRI in neuroscience generate terabytes
gigabytes and terabytes of data that
need to be analyzed so data science
exists across the spectrum of
applications
in business in law in the natural
sciences the social sciences and
humanities
it can be a really key degree
all across the board and that degree
that we've developed actually has
domain applications in all of those
areas
thank you for that okay so uh last
question for you
what can new students do in their first
year to prepare themselves for roles in
research labs like yours
yeah you know um i'll give an example of
how i started when i was an
undergraduate
because i didn't know what to do i had
no idea how to actually get started
i started asking around and asking my
friends and i found
one of them said well i got this job and
i've started to clean fly
vials which are these little vials that
fruit flies live in
and i said well that sounds good i'll
get paid and i'll start learning more
about that
and when i was in high school i really
knew i liked biology but i didn't really
know what it meant to actually be in a
laboratory
and honestly that's a great way to
actually get going in a laboratory
is to just start helping and
volunteering and just
learning about what happens in that lab
what happens in that group you can start
going to the lab meetings
and very quickly you'll start seeing
places where
you can move from doing more of the
basic work to helping a little bit more
to then getting connected with a mentor
in that laboratory
and in my case and that's exactly what
happened after my freshman year and my
sophomore year
then i quickly started developing my own
research questions in many ways didn't
even think about it
because it was just i was part of that
that lab and so many of the laboratories
and research groups at the university of
oregon
expect that that students who are coming
in in their first or second years
are going to be starting at one level
and then we'll move up and so for
example in my lab one of the first
places we get started is
well somebody's got to feed the fish how
do you feel like about feeding the fish
today
now that you've fed the fish let's start
talking about fish biology now let's
move on to the next thing
so don't hesitate ask and don't feel
like you need
this really high level of expertise
because nobody has it
none of us do you always have to start
somewhere so just
reach out and ask thank you that's a
terrific place to end on and that's all
the time that we have for questions
to you students please log on to
community.uoregon.edu to complete your
reflection of this program
also worth noting for students we're at
a critical point at the end of the
summer where you're going to begin to
get more and more information from
various departments on campus
it's really important that you continue
to check your at you oregon email
account and read those emails
with attention all of the emails that
we're sending you in the coming days and
weeks will
have a call to action for you and taking
action on these emails
will be critical to your readiness for
the fall for questions about this or any
other IntroDUCKtion program
you can go to our website
orientation.uoregon.edu
you can email us your questions at
orientation uoregon.edu
or you can text us those questions at
541-346-111
thank you to you students who are
watching live with us for your time
today
and to you Dr. Cresko thank you so much
for helping our new ducks get ready for fall
