Williams Lab Junior Research Symposium Spring 2024!

The Williams Lab celebrated the impressive research contributions of our many talented undergraduate students (front row in the picture) in this year’s first Junior Research Symposium. We delved into investigations of flight muscle histolysis in crickets, a process where the flight muscle breaks down, using dissection and color quantification as well as knockdown approaches leveraging RNA interference, a technique used to decrease expression of target genes. We heard about the influence of the environment (higher temperatures and longer days) in cricket morph determination (long-winged or short-winged morphs), measuring hormone concentrations involved in the process. We also learned about the search for morphological fitness proxies in grasshoppers, such as ovary dissection methods to estimate lifetime reproduction, and morphometric measurements to predict fat content. This intellectual feast was accompanied by a delicious potluck. To learn more about our research check the research menu on our website (https://www.cmwilliamslab.com/research)as well as our publications (https://www.cmwilliamslab.com/publications).