We just finished a fantastic week of field work in Puerto Rico! The Oakley Lab (me, Todd, and our amazing undergrad Stuart) worked in collaboration with Anders Garm and Jan Bilecki to gather Tripedelia jellyfish. We also recorded some incredible ostracod signals with WALLE, and even collected some of the elusive Jimmorinia to bring home! It was a beautiful place to see, and the boat drivers at the marine lab were THE BEST. We didn't miss a trap the entire trip, even collecting them at night.  

Keep your fingers and tentacles crossed for a great Tripedelia genome to come soon!

Oh dear, old words are coming back! A huge undertaking, led by the amazing Marie Drabkova, assessed the phylogenetic positions of dicyemids and orthonectids, and SURPRISE, they came out together. I had the pleasure of generating transcriptomes from preserved dicyemids, which looked like tiny bits of lint floating in a sea of RNALater. We guessed at which little brown shrivels were the right ones, so getting the data back was a delight after a challenging extraction! 

Check out our paper here!