Susan E. Masta

Associate Professor
Department of Biology
P.O. Box 751
Portland State University
Portland, OR 97207-0751

smasta@pdx.edu
phone (503) 725-8505
office 531A Science Building 1
lab 514 Science Building 1

I am interested in the process of biological diversification, and use varied approaches to understand how genes, organisms, and populations evolve. Understanding the evolution of mitochondrial genes, especially those coding for RNA, has been the emphasis of much of my recent work. Data from mitochondrial genomes has also allowed my lab group to help infer the systematic relationships among the arachnids, one of the most species-rich groups of animals. At the population level, I am interested in the factors that promote and inhibit speciation. Current work in my lab focuses on understanding the potentially adaptive role of visual signaling in different ecological settings.


WHAT'S NEW

NEW PROGRAM RELEASED

Mitochondrial tRNA drawing program "mt-tRNA-draw"

Student Mark Youngblood has recently written a program to allow automated illustration of secondary structures of transfer RNAs. The program reads a fasta input file, and outputs a diagram in Adobe Illustrator. The instruction manual and a beta version of the program are available at: http://www.mt-trna-draw.org/