Jacob L Mueller
University of Michigan, MI·Genetics
Some stretches of DNA act selfishly: they find ways to be passed to more offspring than chance would predict, even when this harms the organism. Such sequences can set off evolutionary arms races with competing DNA, and they often affect sperm and fertility.
- Fields
Genetics
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
evolutionary arms race
selfish genetic elements
meiotic drive
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Feb 2030
What they work on
- Determine how the dosage of SLX and SLXL1 proteins on the X chromosome affects their molecular competition with Y-linked SLY1 and SLY2, using yeast three-hybrid competitions and massively parallel sequencing screens.
- Identify the most competitive versions of SLXL1 and SLY2 through saturation mutagenesis, which tests every possible single change in a protein, combined with comparisons of these genes across species.
- Test in transgenic mice whether competitive SLXL1 and SLY2 versions change sperm fertilization success.
- Determine whether two large palindrome arrays on mouse autosomes cause selfish chromosome transmission when one copy is present and are needed for fertility when two are present.
- Determine whether the five large palindrome arrays on the mouse X chromosome cooperate or compete to influence selfish transmission or fertility, using haplotype-resolved genome assemblies that separate parental chromosome copies.
More about the research
Both projects use the mouse to ask how these competitions work, and why unusual repeated DNA on the X, Y and other chromosomes exists at all.
Why it matters
This work could give new insight into the molecular basis of male infertility, sperm defects and sex-ratio distortion, where offspring are skewed toward one sex. It also lays groundwork for studying large palindromic DNA regions and their genes in other species, including humans, and for understanding how chromosomes evolve and how species form.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Daniel Barbash
Cornell University, NY·Genetics
Identify the maternal factors in D. simulans that interact with a D. melanogaster-specific satellite DNA block, a large repetitive non-coding region, to cause chromosome instability and lethality in first-generation hybrids.
William Murphy
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Reconstruct how mammalian chromosomes and their recombination rates changed from a roughly 100-million-year-old inferred ancestor to living species, by pairing chromosome-level genome assemblies with recombination maps.
Michael Lampson
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Genetics
Test whether maternal proteins that activate the paternal genome mismatch with fast-evolving paternal transposons, causing abnormal gene expression in hybrid mouse embryos, using transcriptional and epigenomic profiling of 2-cell embryos.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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