Lab Members

Brandon T. Sinn, Ph.D.

​I am currently an associate professor in the Department of Biology and Earth Science and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, USA.  I am an alumnus of the Freudenstein Lab at The Ohio State University, where I earned my Ph.D. in Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology.  Following my dissertation studies, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Stevenson Lab at the New York Botanical Garden where I contributed to the Plant Ontology.  I later served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Barrett Lab at West Virginia University where my research focused on comparative genomics and phylogenomics.  I have also had the pleasure of serving as a Visiting Associate Professor in the Faculty of Biology at the University of Latvia, where I continue to collaborate with colleagues. I am currently (2024-2027) a co-principal investigator on a nationally-funded (Latvian Council of Science) project developing a molecular toolkit to detect the presence of Apera spica-venti DNA in agricultural soils and seed lots. 

Google Scholar Profile

ResearchGate Profile

Lab Alumni

Cassidy Shaver ('24)

Cassidy worked on Asarum plastome evolution, with a particular focus on the evolution of repeat regions of extremely low complexity -- some of which comprise thousands of nucleotides with a GC content of less than 1%. Cassidy sequenced, assembled, and annotated the plastomes of 12 Asarum species, which includes one of the largest plastomes known. Cassidy is now in dental school at The Ohio State University.

Rebekah Whittaker ('24)

Rebekah hunted down and characterized horizontal gene transfers in the mitogenomes of early diverging lineages of angiosperms -- not an easy thing to do! Her work is ongoing and she presented her results at Botany 2024, the international conference of the Botanical Society of America.

Natalie Reynolds ('24)

Natalie developed the first species-specific nuclear primers for Apera spica-venti, an invasive grass species in Europe. This research is a component of work funded by the Latvian Council of Science in collaboration with Jevgenija Ņečajeva and Anete Borodušķe at the University of Latvia. Natalie is now a PhD student in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, where their research involves population genetics and biogeography of plants in the Madrean Sky Island system.

Hannah Brown ('23)

Hannah watched many, many hours of video documenting arthropod interactions with Asarum shuttleworthii. This work improved our understanding of the types and rate of pollinator visitation to these flowers, and also supported our work with Monika Roznere in the RLab at Dartmouth College toward better characterizing Asarum pollination.

Jenna Howard ('23)

Jenna completely assembled and annotated the plastome of Asarum maximum in her first semester!  She also completed a preliminary investigation of ISSR variation in Asarum rosei, a species endemic to North Carolina.

Katie Kirk ('23)

Katie helped us to assemble mitochondrial contigs for multiple species of Asarum and performed comparative analyses which revealed rates of RNA editing.

Rachel Muti ('21)

Rachel was the first student in the lab here at Otterbein! Rachel leveraged multi-tissue RNAseq and Oxford Nanopore sequencing data to study Whirly1 evolution and differential splicing, expression and exon usage in Corallorhiza, a genus of early-transitional mycoheterotrophic orchids. ​She is currently finishing up a Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Position in the NIH Eunice Kennedy Shriver Institute of Children's Health and Human Development and will begin a PhD program in the Genetics and Molecular Biology Program at Emory University in Fall 2023.