Joel Rodriguez

jrod9876mail.fresnostate.edu

Our research focuses on the concept of speciation and how two populations can begin to diverge from one another. A method we use to identify and study the initiation of speciation is through finding cases of hybrids between two different strains of the same species and compare fitness to the parental strains. The organism we use to conduct our research is with Caenorhabditis briggsae, a closely related nematode to Caenorhabditis elegans. It has been suggested that two Caenorhabditis briggsae strains produce less-fit hybrids because the hybrid genome suffers from a mitochondrial-nuclear genetic incompatibility (Ross et al. 2011). There are various indicators of fitness such as brood size of hybrids as well as overall lifespan. ATP content can directly compare mitochondrial efficiency of the hybrids.