Author: Matzkin Lab at the University of Arizona

I had a wonderful time talking to 7th grade science students at Dodge Middle School in the Tucson Unified School District. We talked about amphibian biodiversity, the frog life cycle and dissected a frog. It is such a treat to see excitement for science and discovery on the faces of these students. Thank you Mrs. Matzkin for the invitation and your extreme dedication to your students. You are the best.

Congratulations to Liam on passing his comprehensive examination!!!

A bit tired, but we all had a wonderful time at annual Department of Entomology Insect Festival. It is always great to share our work with the community and getting both young and old interested in the work we do in the lab.

Congratulations to Zoe on successfully passing the comprehensive exams. Next stop is dissertation defense!!!

I am very proud and honored to have been selected as a 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow. I am thankful to my entire team and colleagues which makes this honor possible. Congratulations to also to my fellow University of Arizona fellows.

This work spearheaded by past postdoc, Fernando Diaz, examines the transcriptional basis for transgenerational effects associated with thermal tolerance (Diaz & Matzkin 2025).

Very proud of our collaborative group publishing a really cool study investigating the genomic basis of Bt-toxin resistance in Helicoverpa zea (Legan et al. 2024).

We all had a wonderful time at the Insect Festival. Always great to see all the community coming out to learn about and see all our wonderful insects.

Since our publication of our paper describing the existence and role of male-derived female-translated proteins (mdFTPs), we have had two nice stories written about it.

One by UANews and the other by KJZZ.

Our paper on the evolutionary and comparative genomics of D. mojavensis, D. arizonae and D. navojoa is published in Genome Biology and Evolution. In it we sequenced, assembled at a chromosome level and annotated the representative genomes of a each of the D. mojavensis host populations (Sonora, Mojave, Baja California and Catalina Island), two D. arizonae populations (Sonora and Chiapas) and D. navojoa. All the genomes and the respective data can be access by all via the CactusFlyBase site.

I dedicated this study to the foundational and impactful work of Bill Heed (University of Arizona), Marvin Wasserman (CUNY) and William Starmer (Syracuse University).