I grew up in the Salt Lake valley, and much of my childhood was spent exploring the American Southwest and the many plants and animals that inhabit it. This peaked my interest in biology, and eventually led me to receive my PhD in the lab of Dr. Richard Clark studying the interactions between herbivorous mites and their plant hosts. I joined the Dearing lab as a postdoc in 2019, and my research since then has focused primarily on how Neotoma woodrats have adapted to feed on creosote. In my spare time, I enjoy hiking and building computers and audio equipment.
17,000 years ago, a climate change event in what is now the American Southwest led to the decline of juniper and its eventual replacement with creosote. As juniper was one of the primary food sources for several Neotoma woodrat species, including N. bryanti and N. lepida, this shift forced each species to independently adapt to a diet containing creosote, a plant rich in novel toxic compounds. In pockets and areas north of the Mojave, however, juniper and juniper-feeding woodrat populations persisted, and they can still be found today. These unique circumstances not only provide the ability to identify the genetic changes associated with creosote adaptation within each species, but also afford the opportunity to see how similar – or different – these adaptations are within the Neotoma genus. Such an analysis requires a high-quality genome for each species, however, and until recently, generating such a resource could be quite difficult. By taking advantage of the fact that these woodrats can hybridize, and employing the newly developed trio binning approach, we were able to generate chromosome-level assemblies for both N. bryanti and N. lepida. To our knowledge, this is the first time this approach has been used successfully with two distinct mammalian species.