Kris' Maters' Defense Went Well

Kris presented his research yesterday at noon in one of our intro biology teaching labs that has an installed projector. About 35 people showed up which is a good-sized Masters' defense at UAH. His work was on the phylogeography of the mummichog, Fundulus heteroclitus, as indicated by comparing sequences of the cyt-b mitochondrial DNA gene. I think we have a good case showing a 100% certain separation of the New England samples from southern samples as determined by 10,000 bootstrap replicates of our UPGMA treebuilding algorithm. The odd thing we've found is that the Virginia Beach and Chincoteague, VA, samples are their own well-resolved clade within the broader southern group including Charleston, SC, and Sapelo Island, GA. Kris has to do some rewriting of his thesis to flesh out and clarify certain parts such as our DNA extraction methods, which in truth I did most of some years back in this 15 year project(!). I'll have to post a picture of our final tree with the strengths of each node in the near future. And I'd like to once again thank Dustin Smith of Columbia, SC, for his help in collecting mummichogs from the Ashley River in Charleston, SC, six years ago whose DNA became part of this study.

The weird part of the day was that as the thesis committee was finishing up our meeting with Kris after the seminar, some of our office people came down obviously flustered and told us that the Biology department was urging people to leave the building. As Kris was giving his talk, the Huntsville Police were serving a warrant at Amy Bishop's house looking for explosives, apparently, and a remote-controlled robot detonated two "bombs" found in the house which were at first reported as actual bombs rather than controlled explosions of suspect devices. The news went out as bombs found, at first, and everybody freaked out that this was part of some kind of bombing campaign by Amy Bishop's husband Jim Anderson. So, we quickly signed the papers as a committee saying that Kris conditionally passed pending thesis changes, and we all left the building and went home. That's a measure of how edgy people are of late.