Lab Members

Brandon T. Sinn, Ph.D.

​I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and Earth Science and 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.

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Students

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) and Hannah Shadd ('24)

Natalie and Hannah are developed allele-specific nuclear primers toward KASP genotyping of Apera spica-venti. This work is a component of work funded by the Latvian Council of Science in collaboration with with Jevgenija Ņečajeva and Anete Boroduske at the University of Latvia.

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. 

Lea Wright ('23)

Lea tested primers for the sequencing of lengthy, low complexity plastid genome regions, which work really well! She also sequenced these regions for more than 10 taxa across the genus Asarum​. The sequences generated by Lea will help us to better understand how these regions have changed through time, and how their evolution might have influenced plastid genome instability.