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titleboxTHOMAS D. KOCHER titlebox

professor pictureProfessor

email:tdk@umd.edu
phone:
301.405.4496 (office)
301.405.6242 (lab)
fax:301.314.9358
office:2132 Bioscience Research Building
graduate programs: Biology, BEES, MEES
bullet visit lab page   bullet most recent publications


RESEARCH INTERESTS

More than 700 species of cichlid fishes have arisen within Lake Malawi within the last million years. We want to understand the evolutionary forces which have caused this rapid speciation. We are mapping genes for phenotypic traits associated with speciation, such as jaw morphology, color pattern, sex determination and mate preferences. Our ultimate goal is to identify the genes responsible for speciation of these fishes, and to study the geographic distribution of allelic variants among populations in the wild.

Recent Publications


DiPalma F, Kidd C, Borowsky R, Kocher TD. Construction of bacterial artificial chromosome libraries for two model fish species: the Lake Malawi cichlid (Metriaclima zebra), and the blind cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus). 2007. Zebrafish 4: (in press)

Cnaani A, Lee BY, Ozouf-Costaz C, Kocher TD. 2007 Mapping of Sox2 and Sox14 in tilapia (Oreochromis spp.). Sexual Development (in press).

Lee BY, Kocher TD. Exclusion of Wilms Tumor (WT1_2) and ovarian aromatase (CYP19A1) as candidates for sex determining genes in Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus). Animal Genetics 38: 85.

Lee BY, Kocher TD. 2007. Comparative genomics and positional cloning. In J. Liu (ed.) Aquaculture Genome Technologies. Blackwell. (in press).

Albertson RC, Kocher TD. 2006. Genetic and developmental basis of adaptive variation in the cichlid feeding apparatus. Heredity 97:211-221.

Kidd MR, Danley PD, Kocher TD. 2006. A direct assay of female choice in cichlid fishes: all the eggs in one basket. Journal of Fish Biology 68:373-384.

Kidd MR, Kidd CE, Kocher TD. 2006. Axes of differentiaion in the bower building cichlids of Lake Malawi. Molecular Ecology 15: 459-478.

Shirak A, Seroussi E, Cnaani A, Howe AE, Domokhovsky R, Zilberman N, Kocher TD, Hulata G, Ron M. 2006. Amh and Dmrta2 genes map to tilapia (Oreochromis spp.) linkage group 23 within QTL regions for sex determination. Genetics 174: 1573-1581.