DEPARTMENT OF INTEGRATIVE BIOLOGY
SHARMA LAB
SHARMA LAB
Welcome to the Sharma Lab! Our research broadly addresses macroevolution of invertebrates through the lenses of phylogenomics, historical biogeography, and comparative development, with emphasis on arthropods.
This body of work integrates three avenues of inquiry:
(1) How is biodiversity distributed in time and space?
(2) How do geological phenomena affect the shape of biodiversity over time?
(3) What are the genetic mechanisms that underlie body plan diversification?
This body of work integrates three avenues of inquiry:
(1) How is biodiversity distributed in time and space?
(2) How do geological phenomena affect the shape of biodiversity over time?
(3) What are the genetic mechanisms that underlie body plan diversification?
Lab News & Events 2018-2020 (updated 15 September 2020):
15 September 2020: The lab is delighted to release the first phylogenomic study of sea spiders! Our collaborative, international project, co-first authored by several students and postdocs from the lab, is featured in Science. Check it out here!
1 September 2020: Welcome to Dr. Caitlin Baker, a new postdoc in the Sharma Lab! Caitlin recently completed her Ph.D. at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Harvard University). She is funded for three years to work with the lab on the genomics and evolution of arachnid eyes.
28 August 2020: The Sharma Lab is delighted to produce the first developmental and genomic resources for the study of Amblypygi! Resurrecting a model system last studied by the legendary Peter Weygoldt, Guilherme Gainett established a year-round colony, sequenced the first developmental transcriptome, and generated in situ hybridization data, of the whip spider Phrynus marginemaculatus. Check it out here!
15 August 2020: Many congratulations to our Dr. Efrat Gavish-Regev and her team on being awarded a competitive Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) grant! Our sister lab at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, is pursuing innovative approaches to deciphering the ecology of cave arachnids of Israel. Check out her work here!
15 August 2020: The lab is delighted to be awarded a National Science Foundation-Binational Science Foundation (NSF-BSF) grant in collaboration with Dr. Efrat Gavish-Regev of Hebrew University, Jerusalem! This four-year award, co-funded by NSF's IOS (Developmental Systems), DEB (Evolutionary Processes), and EDGE programs, supports our collaborative effort to discover the mechanisms of eye development and eye loss in troglomorphic arachnids of Israel--collections-based science meets evolutionary developmental biology!
04 July 2020: This fourth of July, the lab celebrates the release of our preprint on the first evo-devo whip spider model! Guilherme Gainett has worked tirelessly for the past three years on this high-risk system, resuming the pioneering efforts of Peter Weygoldt from the late 1970s on the species Phrynus marginemaculatus. Check it out here!
17 June 2020: The lab is delighted to be awarded a Binational Science Foundation grant in collaboration with Dr. Efrat Gavish-Regev of Hebrew University, Jerusalem! This three-year award will support biodiversity discovery and biogeographic study of Israeli cave arachnofauna.
22 May 2020: Many congratulations to soon-to-be Assistant Professor Carlos E. Santibáñez López, who will be starting a tenure-track position at Western Connecticut State University this fall! Carlos is a former postdoctoral fellow and ongoing research associate of UW-Madison. His research spans taxonomy, population genomics, and phylogenomics of scorpions and other venomous arthropods. Check out his new lab website, Aracnomics!
11 January 2020: The lab visits the annual Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in Austin, Texas, followed by a successful collecting trip for the elusive Prokoenenia wheeleri and Opilioacarus texanus! Prashant Sharma takes over this year as Divisional Secretary of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at SICB. Talks were given by Jesús Ballesteros, Andrew Ontano, and Emily Setton.
18 December 2019: The lab is delighted to release the first phylogenomic study that samples all extant orders of Chelicerata! Co-first authors Jesús A. Ballesteros and Carlos Santibáñez López led a concerted effort with a joint Slovenian-Israeli-US team to complete the sequencing of the rare orders Palpigradi and Opilioacariformes. Check it out here.
18 November 2019: Congratulations to Dr. Carlos Santibáñez López on the publication of his work on the cover of Toxins! Carlos investigated the duplication of a venom peptide in a subset of Iurida scorpions. Check it out here.
21 October 2019: Congratulations to Dr. Jesús A. Ballesteros on the publication of his work on the cover of Systematic Biology! Jesús was able to show that unbiased approaches to gene selection and matrix assembly consistently recover horseshoe crabs as derived arachnids. Check it out here.
10 October 2019: Congratulations to Shlomi Aharon, Jesús Ballesteros, Audrey Crawford, Keyton Friske, Guilherme Gainett, Boaz Langford, Carlos Santibáñez López, and Shemesh Ya'aran on the publication of their work on the cover of Invertebrate Systematics! Check it out here.
7 October 2019: Welcome to Charlotte Kanzler, a rotating PhD student in the Cell and Molecular Biology program! Charlotte joins us for five weeks to learn approaches in evolutionary developmental biology of arachnids.
27 September 2019: Prashant gives a an invited talk at the UW-Madison Genetics Retreat 2019.
8 September 2019: Welcome to undergraduates Kevin Corbett, Maanasa Devabhaktuni, and Simon Rosenblum! Our junior team members are working on such topics as the relationships of sea spiders and how to knock down genes in spiders.
6 September 2019: Congratulations to Emily Setton whose work on tarantula development is featured on the cover of the Journal of Arachnology! Check it out here.
29 August 2019: Prashant gives a seminar at the University of Alabama.
20 May 2019: Prashant gives a seminar at Lawrence University.
19 May 2019: Welcome to Shlomi Aharon, a visiting PhD student from Hebrew University of Jerusalem! Shlomi will stay with the lab for five weeks to train in comparative arthropod genomics and the developmental genetics of arachnids.
8 April 2019: Congratulations to Emily Setton on winning the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program award! This predoctoral fellowship supports Emily's work on the developmental genetics of spiders.
28 March 2019: Our first collaboration with Efrat Gavish-Regev's lab (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is accepted for publication in Invertebrate Systematics! We described a blind species of armored harvestmen (Laniatores) from a cave in Israel. Congratulations to all the students on the paper: Shlomi Aharon, Audrey Crawford, Keyton Friske, and Guilherme Gainett!
1 March 2019: Congratulations to Dr. Carlos Santibáñez López (former postdoctoral fellow and research associate of the lab) on the publication of his new scorpion phylogeny in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution! Carlos' phylogenomic work reveals two new superfamilies of scorpions, Vaejovoidea and Superstitionoidea. Check it out here.
15 February 2019: Many congratulations to Emily Setton and Guilherme Gainett on winning the best student poster and second place prize for oral presentation, respectively, at the 21st International Congress of Arachnology in Christchurch, New Zealand! Emily presented her work on the morphogenesis of spider spinnerets and Guilherme on the evolution of antenniform appendages in Amblypygi.
14 February 2019: Congratulations to Dr. Jesús A. Ballesteros on the publication of his work in Systematic Biology! Jesús' phylogenomic study reveals that arachnids are not a monophyletic group--horseshoe crabs are in fact derived, aquatic arachnids! Check it out here.
6 February 2019: Congratulations to Stephanie Schmidt on the publication of her work in Invertebrate Systematics! Stephanie led a team of US and Filipino scientists in describing the first Tithaeidae (a family of harvestmen) from the Philippines. Check it out here.
3 January 2019: Welcome to John Zern, a new undergraduate in the lab! John joins the spider crew this semester to work on the development of arachnid eyes.
1 December 2018: The lab bids fond and heartfelt farewells to Dr. Carlos Santibáñez López! After two wonderful years in the lab, Carlos is pursuing the phytogeography and evolution of Solifugae (camel spiders) with Professor Matt Graham at Eastern Connecticut University.
14 November 2018: Many congratulations to Carlos Santibáñez López on the publication of his work, using the shape of venom molecules as a phylogenetic character! Carlos has led a team of collaborators both here at UW and at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte to achieve this integrative work. The paper is published here on PeerJ.
12 November 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on winning the Laudier Histology award for attending the International Congress of Arachnology! Guilherme, as well as Andrew Ontano and Emily Setton, will present symposium talks on arachnid development.
15 October 2018: Welcome to new undergraduates Josephine Hall and Mahad Siad!
17 September 2018: Congratulations to Logan March, Rachel Smaby, and Emily Setton on the publication of their work on antennal and leg patterning in insects! The work appears here.
22 June 2018: Congratulations to Emily Setton on winning an NSF travel award to attend the GIGA III meeting in Curaçao! Emily will be presenting her work on the use of differential expression tools to analyze functional experiments in spiders.
22 May 2018: Our collaborative work on a homeotic scorpion mutant from Asia has just been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology! This report constitutes the intersection of natural history, paleontology, and development in scorpions.
18 May 2018: Our lab has just published the first transcriptomic analysis of pseudoscorpion venom! Many congratulations to Carlos Santibáñez-López, who led the bioinformatics, and Andrew Ontano, who collecting this material on his first field trip with Mark Harvey in Western Australia last summer!
15 May 2018: The written exercise of the course Zoology 957 (Topics in the Evolutionary Developmental Biology of Animals) has been profiled in spring 2018's newsletter of the Writing Across the Curriculum program. Check it out here!
11 May 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on winning the International Society of Arachnology's Jan and Oscar Francke Award! This grant support Guilherme's efforts to pursue the study of leg elongation in whip spiders (Amblypygi)
9 May 2018: Congratulation to Emily Setton on winning an American Arachnological Society research award! Emily will be traveling to Colorado to collect the embryos of mygalomorph spiders this summer.
5 May 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on (a) winning a UW-Madison travel award for attendance at the GIGA meeting in Curaçao, (b) winning the Davis research grant for developmental genetic study of leg elongation in whip spiders (Amblypygi), and (c) the acceptance of his paper in the Journal of Morphology. All in one week!
26 March 2018: Congratulations to Emily Setton on the publication of her undergraduate research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)! This work of (mostly) chelicerate evodevo features data from spiders, scorpions, harvestmen, centipedes, horseshoe crabs, onychophorans, and pycnogonids. Check it out here.
2 February 2018: We have just published the first phylogenomic dating of the scorpion tree of life! Check it out here.
24 January 2018: Congratulations to Jesus Ballesteros on being awarded a National Geographic Society grant! Dr. Ballesteros will be conducting fieldwork and population genomic surveys to investigate the evolution of cave dwelling arachnids in Israel.
17 January 2018: Congratulations to Jesus Ballesteros, whose painstaking and meticulous work on species delimitation in spiders just appeared online! See the article here.
7 January 2018: A lovely SICB meeting in San Francisco, with wonderful feedback for students and postdocs on their presentations! This year, PI Sharma is honored to serve as the Secretary-Elect of the Division of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Congratulations as well to Emily Setton for a Charlotte Magnum Award!
15 September 2020: The lab is delighted to release the first phylogenomic study of sea spiders! Our collaborative, international project, co-first authored by several students and postdocs from the lab, is featured in Science. Check it out here!
1 September 2020: Welcome to Dr. Caitlin Baker, a new postdoc in the Sharma Lab! Caitlin recently completed her Ph.D. at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Harvard University). She is funded for three years to work with the lab on the genomics and evolution of arachnid eyes.
28 August 2020: The Sharma Lab is delighted to produce the first developmental and genomic resources for the study of Amblypygi! Resurrecting a model system last studied by the legendary Peter Weygoldt, Guilherme Gainett established a year-round colony, sequenced the first developmental transcriptome, and generated in situ hybridization data, of the whip spider Phrynus marginemaculatus. Check it out here!
15 August 2020: Many congratulations to our Dr. Efrat Gavish-Regev and her team on being awarded a competitive Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) grant! Our sister lab at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, is pursuing innovative approaches to deciphering the ecology of cave arachnids of Israel. Check out her work here!
15 August 2020: The lab is delighted to be awarded a National Science Foundation-Binational Science Foundation (NSF-BSF) grant in collaboration with Dr. Efrat Gavish-Regev of Hebrew University, Jerusalem! This four-year award, co-funded by NSF's IOS (Developmental Systems), DEB (Evolutionary Processes), and EDGE programs, supports our collaborative effort to discover the mechanisms of eye development and eye loss in troglomorphic arachnids of Israel--collections-based science meets evolutionary developmental biology!
04 July 2020: This fourth of July, the lab celebrates the release of our preprint on the first evo-devo whip spider model! Guilherme Gainett has worked tirelessly for the past three years on this high-risk system, resuming the pioneering efforts of Peter Weygoldt from the late 1970s on the species Phrynus marginemaculatus. Check it out here!
17 June 2020: The lab is delighted to be awarded a Binational Science Foundation grant in collaboration with Dr. Efrat Gavish-Regev of Hebrew University, Jerusalem! This three-year award will support biodiversity discovery and biogeographic study of Israeli cave arachnofauna.
22 May 2020: Many congratulations to soon-to-be Assistant Professor Carlos E. Santibáñez López, who will be starting a tenure-track position at Western Connecticut State University this fall! Carlos is a former postdoctoral fellow and ongoing research associate of UW-Madison. His research spans taxonomy, population genomics, and phylogenomics of scorpions and other venomous arthropods. Check out his new lab website, Aracnomics!
11 January 2020: The lab visits the annual Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in Austin, Texas, followed by a successful collecting trip for the elusive Prokoenenia wheeleri and Opilioacarus texanus! Prashant Sharma takes over this year as Divisional Secretary of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at SICB. Talks were given by Jesús Ballesteros, Andrew Ontano, and Emily Setton.
18 December 2019: The lab is delighted to release the first phylogenomic study that samples all extant orders of Chelicerata! Co-first authors Jesús A. Ballesteros and Carlos Santibáñez López led a concerted effort with a joint Slovenian-Israeli-US team to complete the sequencing of the rare orders Palpigradi and Opilioacariformes. Check it out here.
18 November 2019: Congratulations to Dr. Carlos Santibáñez López on the publication of his work on the cover of Toxins! Carlos investigated the duplication of a venom peptide in a subset of Iurida scorpions. Check it out here.
21 October 2019: Congratulations to Dr. Jesús A. Ballesteros on the publication of his work on the cover of Systematic Biology! Jesús was able to show that unbiased approaches to gene selection and matrix assembly consistently recover horseshoe crabs as derived arachnids. Check it out here.
10 October 2019: Congratulations to Shlomi Aharon, Jesús Ballesteros, Audrey Crawford, Keyton Friske, Guilherme Gainett, Boaz Langford, Carlos Santibáñez López, and Shemesh Ya'aran on the publication of their work on the cover of Invertebrate Systematics! Check it out here.
7 October 2019: Welcome to Charlotte Kanzler, a rotating PhD student in the Cell and Molecular Biology program! Charlotte joins us for five weeks to learn approaches in evolutionary developmental biology of arachnids.
27 September 2019: Prashant gives a an invited talk at the UW-Madison Genetics Retreat 2019.
8 September 2019: Welcome to undergraduates Kevin Corbett, Maanasa Devabhaktuni, and Simon Rosenblum! Our junior team members are working on such topics as the relationships of sea spiders and how to knock down genes in spiders.
6 September 2019: Congratulations to Emily Setton whose work on tarantula development is featured on the cover of the Journal of Arachnology! Check it out here.
29 August 2019: Prashant gives a seminar at the University of Alabama.
20 May 2019: Prashant gives a seminar at Lawrence University.
19 May 2019: Welcome to Shlomi Aharon, a visiting PhD student from Hebrew University of Jerusalem! Shlomi will stay with the lab for five weeks to train in comparative arthropod genomics and the developmental genetics of arachnids.
8 April 2019: Congratulations to Emily Setton on winning the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program award! This predoctoral fellowship supports Emily's work on the developmental genetics of spiders.
28 March 2019: Our first collaboration with Efrat Gavish-Regev's lab (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is accepted for publication in Invertebrate Systematics! We described a blind species of armored harvestmen (Laniatores) from a cave in Israel. Congratulations to all the students on the paper: Shlomi Aharon, Audrey Crawford, Keyton Friske, and Guilherme Gainett!
1 March 2019: Congratulations to Dr. Carlos Santibáñez López (former postdoctoral fellow and research associate of the lab) on the publication of his new scorpion phylogeny in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution! Carlos' phylogenomic work reveals two new superfamilies of scorpions, Vaejovoidea and Superstitionoidea. Check it out here.
15 February 2019: Many congratulations to Emily Setton and Guilherme Gainett on winning the best student poster and second place prize for oral presentation, respectively, at the 21st International Congress of Arachnology in Christchurch, New Zealand! Emily presented her work on the morphogenesis of spider spinnerets and Guilherme on the evolution of antenniform appendages in Amblypygi.
14 February 2019: Congratulations to Dr. Jesús A. Ballesteros on the publication of his work in Systematic Biology! Jesús' phylogenomic study reveals that arachnids are not a monophyletic group--horseshoe crabs are in fact derived, aquatic arachnids! Check it out here.
6 February 2019: Congratulations to Stephanie Schmidt on the publication of her work in Invertebrate Systematics! Stephanie led a team of US and Filipino scientists in describing the first Tithaeidae (a family of harvestmen) from the Philippines. Check it out here.
3 January 2019: Welcome to John Zern, a new undergraduate in the lab! John joins the spider crew this semester to work on the development of arachnid eyes.
1 December 2018: The lab bids fond and heartfelt farewells to Dr. Carlos Santibáñez López! After two wonderful years in the lab, Carlos is pursuing the phytogeography and evolution of Solifugae (camel spiders) with Professor Matt Graham at Eastern Connecticut University.
14 November 2018: Many congratulations to Carlos Santibáñez López on the publication of his work, using the shape of venom molecules as a phylogenetic character! Carlos has led a team of collaborators both here at UW and at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte to achieve this integrative work. The paper is published here on PeerJ.
12 November 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on winning the Laudier Histology award for attending the International Congress of Arachnology! Guilherme, as well as Andrew Ontano and Emily Setton, will present symposium talks on arachnid development.
15 October 2018: Welcome to new undergraduates Josephine Hall and Mahad Siad!
17 September 2018: Congratulations to Logan March, Rachel Smaby, and Emily Setton on the publication of their work on antennal and leg patterning in insects! The work appears here.
22 June 2018: Congratulations to Emily Setton on winning an NSF travel award to attend the GIGA III meeting in Curaçao! Emily will be presenting her work on the use of differential expression tools to analyze functional experiments in spiders.
22 May 2018: Our collaborative work on a homeotic scorpion mutant from Asia has just been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology! This report constitutes the intersection of natural history, paleontology, and development in scorpions.
18 May 2018: Our lab has just published the first transcriptomic analysis of pseudoscorpion venom! Many congratulations to Carlos Santibáñez-López, who led the bioinformatics, and Andrew Ontano, who collecting this material on his first field trip with Mark Harvey in Western Australia last summer!
15 May 2018: The written exercise of the course Zoology 957 (Topics in the Evolutionary Developmental Biology of Animals) has been profiled in spring 2018's newsletter of the Writing Across the Curriculum program. Check it out here!
11 May 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on winning the International Society of Arachnology's Jan and Oscar Francke Award! This grant support Guilherme's efforts to pursue the study of leg elongation in whip spiders (Amblypygi)
9 May 2018: Congratulation to Emily Setton on winning an American Arachnological Society research award! Emily will be traveling to Colorado to collect the embryos of mygalomorph spiders this summer.
5 May 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on (a) winning a UW-Madison travel award for attendance at the GIGA meeting in Curaçao, (b) winning the Davis research grant for developmental genetic study of leg elongation in whip spiders (Amblypygi), and (c) the acceptance of his paper in the Journal of Morphology. All in one week!
26 March 2018: Congratulations to Emily Setton on the publication of her undergraduate research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)! This work of (mostly) chelicerate evodevo features data from spiders, scorpions, harvestmen, centipedes, horseshoe crabs, onychophorans, and pycnogonids. Check it out here.
2 February 2018: We have just published the first phylogenomic dating of the scorpion tree of life! Check it out here.
24 January 2018: Congratulations to Jesus Ballesteros on being awarded a National Geographic Society grant! Dr. Ballesteros will be conducting fieldwork and population genomic surveys to investigate the evolution of cave dwelling arachnids in Israel.
17 January 2018: Congratulations to Jesus Ballesteros, whose painstaking and meticulous work on species delimitation in spiders just appeared online! See the article here.
7 January 2018: A lovely SICB meeting in San Francisco, with wonderful feedback for students and postdocs on their presentations! This year, PI Sharma is honored to serve as the Secretary-Elect of the Division of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Congratulations as well to Emily Setton for a Charlotte Magnum Award!