Claudio Casola

Evolutionary biology, forest genomics

Dr. Casola and his research team at The Casola Lab are interested in studying genome evolution and adaptation in plants using both experimental and computational approaches. They are currently investigating in three main areas: 

• Evolution of lineage-specific traits and adaptation through gene turnover.
• Population variation in drought tolerance in loblolly pine
• Molecular basis of convergent evolution

Li J, West JB, Hart A, Wegrzyn JL, Smith MA, Domec J-C, Loopstra CA, Casola C (2021) “Extensive variation in drought-induced gene expression changes between loblolly pine genotypes. Frontiers in Genetics”. Front Genet May 31.

Ruckman SN, Jonika MM, Casola C, Blackmon H (2020) “Chromosome number evolves at equal rates in holocentric and monocentric clades”. PLoS Genet Oct 13;16(10):e1009076.

Xing Y, Dabney A, Li X, Wang G, Gill CA, Casola C (2020) “SECNVs: A Simulator of Copy Number Variants and Whole-Exome Sequences From Reference Genomes”. Front Genet 11:82.

Casola C, Lawing AM (2019). “The nonrandom evolution of gene families”. Am J Bot 106(1):14-17.

Casola C (2018) “From de novo to ‘de nono’: the majority of novel protein coding genes identified with phylostratigraphy represent old genes or recent duplicates”. Genome Biol Evol 10(11): 2906–2918.