David Lowry

About Me

I am a sixth year graduate student in the Duke University Program in Genetics and Genomics, who hails from the redwood empire and wine country of Northern California. I spent 4.5 years of long latte-drinking nights at UC Berkeley during the thrilling boom and crash of the dot-com era. After college, I set out to explore the finer delights of world cultures and wildlife before joining the grind of graduate school. Alas, my time at Duke has been good to me thanks to many fantastic people and my amazingly optimistic leader/advisor, Dr. Johh Willis.

The focus of my research is directed toward understanding the genetics of adaptation and speciation. To this end, I have chosen to study how divergent adaptation of the yellow monkey flower (Mimulus guttatus), to the coast versus inland habitat, contributes to reproductive isolation. I am using a combination of QTL mapping and candidate gene strategies to determine the genetic mechanisms that underlie the divergence of morphological and life-history traits between coast and inland Mimulus guttatus. Further, I have carried out reciprocal transplant experiments and population genetic analysis to demonstrate that coast and inland Mimulus are locally adapted and reproductively isolated. I am currently conducting a new reciprocal transplant experiment with near isogenic lines to test hypotheses of local adaptation and introgression between ecogeographic races. In addition, I am conducting genetic analysis of flowering time under different light conditions, anthocyanin production in vegetative tissues, and ion accumulation. I am also working on the assembly of the Mimulus guttatus genome.

Publications

Lowry, D. B. A brief history of local adaptation and 'stages in the evolution of plant species.' In prep

Lowry, D. B., C. Sheng, J.H. Willis. Genetics of variation in four vegetative anthocyanin phenotypes in Mimulus guttatus. In prep

Lowry, D. B., J. H. Willis. Chromosomal inversion linked to adaptive divergence and life-history shift of Mimulus guttatus ecological races. In prep

Lowry, D. B., S. R. Kirshenbaum. Fulfilling the promises of a transgenic future. Submitted

Hall M. C., D. B. Lowry, J. H. Willis. (2010). Multiple independent genetic loci control local adaptation in wild populations of Mimulus guttatus. Molecular Ecology. In revision

Lowry, D. B. (2010) Landscape evolutionary genomics. Biology Letters. In press

Wu, C. A., D. B. Lowry, L. I. Nutter, J. H. Willis. (2010) Natural variation for drought response in the Mimulus guttatus species complex. Oecologia 162: 23-33

Lowry, D. B., M. C. Hall, D. E. Salt, J. H. Willis. (2009). Genetic and physiological basis of adaptive salt tolerance divergence between coastal and inland Mimulus guttatus. New Phytologist 183: 776-788

Lowry, D. B., J. L. Modliszewski, K. M. Wright, C. A. Wu, J. H. Willis. (2008). The strength and genetic basis of reproductive isolating barriers in flowering plants. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363: 3009-3021

Lowry, D. B., R. C. Rockwood, J. H. Willis. (2008). Ecological reproductive isolation of coast and inland races of Mimulus guttatus. Evolution 62: 2196-2214

Wu, C. A., D. B. Lowry, A. M. Cooley, K. M. Wright, Y. W. Lee, and J. H. Willis. (2008). Mimulus is an emerging model system for the integration of ecological and genomic studies. Heredity 100: 220-230.