Recent Work
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Elected as Fellow of the Linnean Society
On May 21st 2017 I was officially elected as Fellow…
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“Minding the gaps in cellular evolution”
Our latest article we discuss some recent work from Thijis Ettema's…
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Accepting applications for 2 Exciting Collaborative PhD projects
Very excited to announce that we have two new collaborative…
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Launch of Our Leeds Omics Virtual Institute
Save the date: 21st June for the launch of Leeds…
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“Sloths’ ancestors may have crossed Atlantic”
by Chris Bunting, Senior Press Officer The family tree of the largest group of mammals—those that nourish their young with placentas—divided later than scientists previously thought, according to a new study. The findings show that one of the great mammal lineages—the xenartha group, which includes armadillos, sloths and anteaters and is today found only in…
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EMBO phylogenomics course in the Amazon
I had the tremendous pleasure of teaching a very talented and motivated bunch of students on an EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organisation) funded course. The course was delivered in the amazon jungle city of Iquitos Peru, the largest jungle city in the world unconnected by road to the rest of the world. It was…
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Dr O’Connell becomes Associate Editor for GBE
Dr O’Connell has been invited to the board of associate editors for Genome Biology and Evolution (GBE). GBE is an Oxford University Press journal owned by the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, and is in the top ten evolutionary biology journals internationally and has an impact factor of 4.2. “I feel honoured to have been…
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Placental Mammals and the limits of phylogenetic inference
More support for Atlantogenata. This week an international collaborative effort has tackled a major challenge in phylogenetics – the interrelationships amongst placental mammals. The paper has just been published in Genome Biology and Evolution (please click here to see the paper). In work led by Dr James Tarver and Dr Davide Pisani (with contributions from…
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The origin of Eukaryotes and the Ring of Life
In our latest work on the origin of eukaryotes published in a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (link to full issue) compiled and edited by Professor Martin Embley and Dr Tom Williams, we advocate a ‘domain-free’ view of the history of life. Debates about whether there should be two domains…
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Dr Mary O’Connell on Extinction at TEDx DCU
So I took to the stage to talk about evolution and mass extinction for the TEDx DCU event in 2015. It was pitched for the general audience and was really good fun. It is a real challenge to get these concepts across and not bore people to death ! I am not sure I have…
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Graduation time for Dr Andrew Webb and Dr Kathryn McRae
It was freezing and there was a northerly wind whipping through DCU campus but that wasn’t going to keep us from smiling ! We had a double celebration in our group today with the graduation of Dr Andrew Webb and Dr Kathryn McRae photographed here with our president Prof Brian Mac Craith. Kathryn was supervised…
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Of mice and men
Super treat in the lab this week. The journal Science decided to feature one of our publications in its “Editor’s Choice” section. The author of the little piece is Laura Zahn and she chose to feature the work, which was published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. It is always a real thrill to have work…
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Genomics of the longest lived mammal
This week the genome and transcriptome of the Bowhead whale was published in the journal Cell reports. For more please see our publications page for the pdf or click here This work was carried out by Dr Andrew Webb (first author) and Dr Mary O’Connell in collaboration with an international team of experts and was led by…
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A matter of Taste
“Evolution of sweet taste perception in hummingbirds by transformation of the ancestral umami receptor” Baldwin et al Science 2014 Why study birds to understand sensory perception? Birds are a group of therapod dinosaurs that evolved during the mid Mesozoic era (~150 million years ago). They represent one of the most diverse extant vertebrate clades…