Heath Blackmon

Biography

Educational Background

• 2015 Ph.D., Quantitative Biology, University of Texas at Arlington
• 2010 B.S., Environmental Science, Oregon State University, Summa Cum Laude

Research Interests

• The Blackmon Lab is in the Biology Department at Texas A&M University. We have two broad areas of inquiry. The first is genome evolution, specifically sex chromosome and structural evolution. The second is the development of methods and databases that accelerate the analysis of data within a quantitative genetic or phylogenetic framework. To address these topics, we use a broad range of approaches including theoretical population genetics, bioinformatics, genomics, and molecular cytogenetics. Although we have projects involving all types of organisms, we often study beetles, and we keep several species in the lab as model organisms.

  Fragile Y Hypothesis

  Chromosomal sex determination is phylogenetically widespread, having arisen independently in many lineages. Decades of theoretical work provide predictions about sex chromosome differentiation that are well supported by observations in both XY and ZW systems. However, the phylogenetic scope of previous work gives us a limited understanding of the pace of sex chromosome gain and loss and why Y or W chromosomes are more often lost in some lineages than others, creating XO or ZO systems. Contrary to our initial expectations, we find that highly degenerated Y chromosomes of many members of the Coleoptera suborder Polyphaga are rarely lost and that cases of Y chromosome loss are strongly associated with chiasmatic segregation during male meiosis. We propose the “Fragile Y Hypothesis” that recurrent selection to reduce recombination between the X and Y chromosome leads to the evolution of a small pseudoautosomal region, which, in taxa that require XY chiasmata for proper segregation during meiosis, increases the probability of aneuploid gamete production, with Y chromosome loss. This hypothesis predicts that taxa that evolve achiasmatic segregation during male meiosis will rarely lose the Y chromosome.

  Genetic Architecture

  The pace and direction of evolution are governed by the genetic architecture of trait variation. Evolutionary biologists have disagreed about whether genes can be considered to act in isolation, or in the context of their genetic background (Fisher Wright debate). Line cross analysis (LCA) estimates genetic architecture parameters conditional on the best model chosen from a vast model space using relatively few line means and ignores uncertainty in model choice. To address these issues, we introduced an information theoretic approach to LCA, which comprehensively assesses the potential model space, quantifies model selection uncertainty, and uses model weighted averaging to estimate composite genetic effects accurately. Using simulated data and previously published LCA studies we have shown the utility of our approach to define the components of complex genetic architectures. Our analysis of 20+ previously published datasets also shows that traditional approaches have underestimated the importance of epistasis.

  Insect Karyotypes

  Insects exhibit variation in both chromosome number and sex chromosome systems. Insect karyotypes have been an important source of data for both taxonomic and basic evolutionary biology research. Unfortunately, this data has always been scattered among journals and dissertations that are not accessible without subscriptions. We created the Tree of Sex Database to make this data open and available to all researchers. We curate the insect portion of this database that currently has over 15,000 records and has proven to be a valuable resource to explore and test ideas about the evolution of high-level genome evolution. Recently we published a synthesis of this vast dataset and uncovered many interesting patterns and avenues for future investigations. We also recently published a subset of this data as the Coleoptera Karyotype Database. Beetle karyotypes are particularly powerful since they normally include information about the meiotic behavior of sex chromosomes.

  Chromosome Number

  It has long been thought that in Eusocial insect selection to increase genetic diversity within a colony should indirectly select for increases in the number of chromosomes. To test this long-standing hypothesis, we investigated the relationship between eusociality and chromosome number across Hymenoptera. We found that solitary and social Hymenoptera do not have significantly different numbers of chromosomes. However, we did find that chromosome number evolves more quickly in social than solitary Hymenoptera. It remains unclear whether variable selection pressure or drift are responsible for this difference.

  
  

  Laboratory Details

  Laboratory Address:
  Biological Sciences Building West
  Room 119

Selected Publications

• 1. Alfieri, JM, Hingoranee, R, Athrey, GN, Blackmon, H. Domestication is Associated with Increased Interspecific Hybrid Compatibility in Landfowl (Order: Galliformes). J Hered. 2023; :. doi: 10.1093/jhered/esad059. PubMed PMID:37769441 .
  2. Alfieri, JM, Jonika, MM, Dulin, JN, Blackmon, H. Tempo and Mode of Genome Structure Evolution in Insects. Genes (Basel). 2023;14 (2):. doi: 10.3390/genes14020336. PubMed PMID:36833264 PubMed Central PMC9957073.
  3. Smith, J, Alfieri, JM, Anthony, N, Arensburger, P, Athrey, GN, Balacco, J et al.. Fourth Report on Chicken Genes and Chromosomes 2022. Cytogenet Genome Res. 2022;162 (8-9):405-528. doi: 10.1159/000529376. PubMed PMID:36716736 .
  4. Alfieri, JM, Johnson, T, Linderholm, A, Blackmon, H, Athrey, GN. Genomic investigation refutes record of most diverged avian hybrid. Ecol Evol. 2023;13 (1):e9689. doi: 10.1002/ece3.9689. PubMed PMID:36620416 PubMed Central PMC9817184.
  5. Morelli, MW, Blackmon, H, Hjelmen, CE. Diptera and Drosophila Karyotype Databases: A Useful Dataset to Guide Evolutionary and Genomic Studies. Front Ecol Evol. 2022;10 :. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2022.832378. PubMed PMID:36238425 PubMed Central PMC9555809.
  6. Pitonak, M, Aceves, M, Kumar, PA, Dampf, G, Green, P, Tucker, A et al.. Effects of biological sex mismatch on neural progenitor cell transplantation for spinal cord injury in mice. Nat Commun. 2022;13 (1):5380. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-33134-x. PubMed PMID:36104357 PubMed Central PMC9474813.
  7. Perry, A, McGaugh, SE, Keene, AC, Blackmon, H. CaveCrawler: an interactive analysis suite for cavefish bioinformatics. G3 (Bethesda). 2022;12 (8):. doi: 10.1093/g3journal/jkac132. PubMed PMID:35708643 PubMed Central PMC9339328.
  8. Jonika, MM, Alfieri, JM, Sylvester, T, Buhrow, AR, Blackmon, H. Why not Y naught. Heredity (Edinb). 2022;129 (2):75-78. doi: 10.1038/s41437-022-00543-z. PubMed PMID:35581478 PubMed Central PMC9338309.
  9. Hancock, ZB, Lehmberg, ES, Blackmon, H. Phylogenetics in space: How continuous spatial structure impacts tree inference. Mol Phylogenet Evol. 2022;173 :107505. doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2022.107505. PubMed PMID:35577296 PubMed Central PMC10289471.
  10. Alfieri, JM, Wang, G, Jonika, MM, Gill, CA, Blackmon, H, Athrey, GN et al.. A Primer for Single-Cell Sequencing in Non-Model Organisms. Genes (Basel). 2022;13 (2):. doi: 10.3390/genes13020380. PubMed PMID:35205423 PubMed Central PMC8872538.
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