My Research

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I am currently a PhD candidate at Penn State University studying the genomics of corals. Specifically, I am trying to develop new computational tools and adapt human health-related tools for use in this really complex system. This ranges from using metagenome assemblers to simultaneously assemble the genomes of the coral host and its symbionts to using Pool-Seq to understand unintentional artificial selection in ex-situ coral breeding cultures. I am also involved in the so-called “Global Search” project, highlighted here on the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation website. The goal of this project is to perform the same heat stress experiment across dozens of species across the world’s oceans to find out if there is shared genomic mechanism of heat tolerance across the diversity of corals.

Prior to starting at Penn State, I worked at Cornell University as a technician with post-doc Diana Baetscher and PIs Nina Therkildsen and Pete McIntyre. The broad goal of the project was to apply DNA metabarcoding to identify which fish and oceans are utilized to create feeds to grow the world’s aquacultured species.

Relevant publications/pre-prints from this project:

  1. Baetscher DS, Locatelli NS, Won ET, Fitzgerald T, McIntyre PB, and NO Therkildsen (2021) Optimizing a metabarcoding primer portfolio for taxon detection and identification in complex mixtures of diverse fishes. Authorea.

  2. Locatelli NS, McIntyre PB, Therkildsen NO, and DS Baetscher (2020) GenBank‘s reliability is uncertain for biodiversity researchers seeking species-level assignment for eDNA. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(51) 32211-32212.

This is my study site! I’ve got the samples and now all I need to do is figure out what’s going on in that DNA

While doing my masters at Columbia University, I also worked on corals as a study system. For my thesis, I sampled Porites compressa and Montipora capitata in Kaneohe Bay, Oahu with the goal of understanding if population genetic structure can occur in corals on such small spatial scales.

Relevant pre-print from this project:

  1. Locatelli NS and JA Drew (2019) Population structure and clonal prevalence of scleractinian corals (Montipora capitata and Porites compressa) in Kaneohe Bay, Oahu. bioRxiv.