It’s a great afternoon for stock-flipping! 🔱⚾️

We're grateful to the #NSF for funding our work over the last 8 years. This support has helped >30 undergraduates engage deeply with research, half of whom have earned authorship on our papers. Many more students across the US should continue to have such opportunities in the years ahead.

We were surprised to find that a highly divergent ortholog from D. mojavensis was perfectly functional in mel, but @lacholt.bsky.social tracked down some structural and sequence similarities that might explain the result. We'd love to get feedback on the project!

The goddard gene is required for fly sperm tail elongation in melanogaster. We took a page from the @harmitmalik.bsky.social and @levine-lab.bsky.social book and asked whether we could learn about which aspects of the mel protein are important by testing divergent orthologs for function in mel.

Our undergraduate team, led by Sara Guay '23, with a big assist from Jonathan Thomalla from @wolfnerlab.bsky.social, discovered the first molecularly identified gene to be required for D. melanogaster sperm to efficiently enter eggs! Sara also got admitted to several MD programs this winter!

Goddard manuscript submitted!