This spring, EEB graduate student Francis Dinh achieved a significant milestone in his research on the threespine stickleback. Dinh was awarded the Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant, which provides funding to support travel and related expenses essential for doctoral dissertation research. This grant enabled Dinh to continue his fieldwork this summer along the Atlantic coast in Nova Scotia, advancing his study of the species’ unique evolutionary traits.
A small and abundant fish, the threespine stickleback is a remarkable model organism capable of evolving dramatically different forms in a short amount of time. Dinh's focus is on two forms along the coast of Nova Scotia. His work specifically focuses on two varieties of the same species which live side by side in the same estuaries. Despite dramatic differences in behavior and appearance, the two forms interbreed and remain genetically nearly identical, which raises a fascinating question: what is holding them apart?
The Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant supports his 7-week long field sampling along the Atlantic coast of four different provinces in Canada. By sequencing the genomes of white and common sticklebacks across the West Atlantic seaboard, Dinh's hope is to identify the specific genomic regions that maintain these differences and how far across the ocean this genetic signature might reach.