Dean Lavelle

I've been a member of the Michelmore lab since February of '93 when I joined as an undergraduate researcher! I continued to work with Dr. Richard W. Michelmore as a staff researcher after obtaining my undergraduate degree in Genetics and Biochemistry in 1993. I have performed Bulked Segregant Analysis using RAPD's and AFLP's to resistance gene clusters in lettuce and I later mapped deletion mutants using these same techniques. I screened over 50K loci. Beginning in the fall of 1995, I worked for the College of Agriculture under the supervision of Dr. Richard W Michelmore and ran the college's sequencing facility: Plant Genetics Facility (PGF). During my tenure, I advanced sequencing read lengths from ~400 nt to 1000 nt . Reads from BAC's went from 0 nt to 800 nt in that same period! While operating the PGF, I decided to "go back to school" to earn a Ph.D. in genetics. Although the process is still ongoing, I'm enjoying every minute. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Domestication traits in lettuce

The characterization and genetic mapping of orthologous lettuce genes to Arabidopsis will help to elucidate many regulatory networks and developmental programs in lettuce. Our lab is currently measuring many quantitative traits in a recombinant inbred line (RIL) mapping population of the wild Lactuca serriola x cultivated Lactuca sativa cv. Salinas associated with the domestication of wild lettuce. I am planning to correlate this quantitative trait data to mapped candidate genes gleaned from the collection of sequenced cDNA's and assembled gene contigs found in the Compositae Genome Project. For this project, I plan to map candidate genes in lettuce to the following areas using inexpensive universal primer and heteroduplex approaches:

1. genes involved in the transition from vegetative to flowering states in Lactuca.
2. MADS transcription factors found in Lactuca spp. sativa cv. Salinas and serriola. (I will also phylogentically characterize these family members.)
3. genes that are easily mapped due to identified InDels, SSRs, and SNPs polymorphisms detected in silico between the two parental genotypes.

Scyld Linux Based Beowulf Cluster Computing

I've built a low cost cluster of Intel Pentium III based computers for bio-computing. Please see my web page for general construction and for downloading the FASTA makefile for Scyld based Beowulf clusters using mpi: http://pgfmars.ucdavis.edu/~dlavelle/cluster.

Sequencing: The Plant Genetics Facility

For sequence submissions and for general procedural questions including a mini-prep protocol developed by my brother Dan, see http://plantgeneticsfacility.ucdavis.edu.