Sarah D. Kocher

The paper investigates how a supergene in fire ants influences genome regulation through chromatin accessibility, enhancer activity, and gene expression.

This study examines the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) across eleven animal species, finding that DFE co-varies with phylogeny and that mammals have more deleterious mutations than insects and birds.

The paper shows that in queenless bumble bee colonies, workers show increased behavioral variation and take on influential roles, leading to a shift from centralized to decentralized social networks.

pipemake creates modular Snakemake workflows for reproducible biological data analysis, reducing hands-on time and enabling flexible pipeline adaptation.

The paper examines X chromosome evolution in treehoppers, finding long-term conservation with one exception of an X-autosome fusion in a species.

The paper identifies enhancer activity differences between social and solitary populations of Lasioglossum albipes, linking cis-regulatory variation to social behavior evolution.

This study develops a theoretical model showing that season length and development time can drive the emergence and coexistence of social and solitary behaviors in insects.

The paper shows that developmental transcriptomes predict adult social behaviors in sweat bees, linking environmental temperature to social structure through transcriptomic differences.

The paper shows the blood-brain barrier regulates social behavior in ants by controlling hormone levels via a key enzyme, with implications for conserved mechanisms across species.

The paper develops a novel pipeline for viral metagenomics in bees, identifying 127 novel viruses across multiple species and regions.