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WJU Graduate’s Research Puts New Spin on Spider Evolution

WHEELING – For Moundsville native and West Liberty University graduate Nicole Garrison, there can be a lot of fascinating discoveries from some of the world’s smallest things.

Garrison is currently doing research on the evolution of spiders by studying their genes at Auburn University, Ala., where she is completing her doctoral degree. Her work was recently recognized in an article in “Nature” magazine, an international weekly journal of science.

“It was pretty exciting,” Garrison said. “‘Nature’ is a very famous scientific journal and it was interesting they picked up on our paper.”

Garrison was co-first author on a paper “Phylogenomics Resolves a Spider Backbone Phylogeny and Rejects a Prevailing Paradigm for Orb Web Evolution” along with Jason Bond, her student adviser at Auburn University. Bond is also director of the Auburn University Museum of Natural History

Garrison now looks through and organizes millions of genetic sequence reads of spiders to begin to piece together how groups of spiders are related to each other from an evolutionary standpoint. The goal, she said, is to figure out the spider “tree of life.”

“We don’t really know how spiders are related to each other,” Garrison said. “There’s been a lot of work put into describing species, but how they are related to each other is unclear.”

Garrison first became interested in studying invertebrate animals while she was a student in the biology program at West Liberty University. Garrison spent her time at WLU outside in the field studying crayfish with biology professor Zach Loughman and wanted to continue doing similar work in graduate school.

She said it was Loughman who first directed her to Bond’s work with spiders at Auburn University.

“When I started I wanted to do something similar with spiders that I was doing with crayfish which was a biodiversity project,” Garrison said. “Instead I got into next generation phylogenomics. WLU was lots of fun and I learned a lot, but it’s extremely different than what I’ve been doing in grad school. Instead of doing it in the field, now most of my work is behind a computer.”

“We’re very proud of Nicole,” Loughman said of Garrison’s work. “To have her work mentioned favorably in Nature is a big deal and we applaud her efforts.”

Garrison is completing her doctoral degree in biology with an anticipated graduation in 2016.

Garrison said she would like to continue doing research with invertebrates after graduation.

“Invertebrates are so cool and so little is known about them” Garrison said. “If you look closely at any group of them, you’re going to see something new to science. It’s almost guaranteed.”

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