Background

I grew up in Lexington, MA, a suburb of Boston. I then moved to Providence, RI, where I got my B.S. at Brown University in 2001 working with David Rand on understanding the functional consequences of nuclear-mitochondrial interactions in Drosophila. I remained at Brown for a year, working in David's lab studying adaptive enzyme polymorphisms in intertidal barnacles, before moving to Ithaca, NY to pursue my Ph.D. at Cornell University in Andy Clark's lab. My dissertation research focused on the evolutionary genetics of the innate immune system in Drosophila. At Cornell, I also worked on comparative genomics of Drosophila, focusing on the analysis of the first 12 sequenced genomes and what that genomic resource could teach us about molecular evolution. After received my Ph.D. in 2008, I moved back to Boston to join the Hartl Laboratory as a postdoc.

Research Interests

I am interested broadly how is phenotypic and genetic variation is maintained in natural populations and the genetic basis of adaptive evolution between populations and species. As a graduate student, I studied the genetic basis of variation for immune function in natural populations of Drosophila melanogaster. I also studied how the immune system evolves both at the sequence level and the level of gene content over the Drosophila phylogeny, and showed that different functional components of the immune system have very different evolutionary patterns. More recently, I am interested in the consequences for organismal phenotypes and global gene expression of polymorphism and divergence on the Y chromosome.

 

Recent Publications

 

Nasonia Genome Working Group. Functional and evolutionary insights from the genomes of three parasitoid Nasonia species. Science (2010) vol. 327 (5963) pp. 343-8. PDF

 

Sackton, T. B., B. P. Lazzaro, and A. G. Clark. Genotype and gene expression associations with immune function in Drosophila. PLoS Genet (2010) vol. 6 (1) pp. e1000797. PDF

 

Sackton, T. B. and A. G. Clark. Comparative profiling of the transcriptional response to infection in two species of Drosophila by short-read cDNA sequencing. BMC Genomics (2009) vol. 10 pp. 259. PDF

 

Sackton T. B., R. J. Kulathinal, C. M. Bergman, A. R. Quinlan, E. B. Dopman, M. Carneiro, G. T. Marth, D. L. Hartl, and A. G. Clark. Population Genomic Inferences from Sparse High-Throughput Sequencing of Two Populations of Drosophila melanogaster. Genome Biol Evol (2009) vol. 2009 pp. 449-65. PDF

 

Singh, N. D., A. M. Larracuente, T. B. Sackton, and A. G. Clark. Comparative Genomics on the Drosophila Phylogenetic Tree. Annu Rev Ecol Evol S (2009) vol. 40 pp. 459-480. PDF

 

Larracuente, A. M.*, T. B. Sackton*, A. J. Greenberg, A. Wong, N. D. Singh, D. Sturgill, Y. Zhang, B. Oliver, and A. G. Clark. Evolution of protein-coding genes in Drosophila. Trends Genet (2008) vol. 24 (3) pp. 114-23. *these authors contributed equally. PDF

 

Sackton T. B., B. P. Lazzaro, T. A. Schlenke, J. D. Evans, D. Hultmark, and A. G. Clark. Dynamic evolution of the innate immune system in Drosophila. Nat Genet (2007) vol. 39 (12) pp. 1461-8. PDF

 

Drosophila 12 Genomes Consortium. Evolution of genes and genomes on the Drosophila phylogeny. Nature (2007) vol. 450 (7167) pp. 203-18. PDF

 

Lazzaro, B. P., T. B. Sackton, and A. G. Clark. Genetic variation in Drosophila melanogaster resistance to infection: a comparison across bacteria. Genetics (2006) vol. 174 (3) pp. 1539-54. PDF

 

Nielsen, R., C. D. Bustamante, A. G. Clark, S. Glanowski, T. B. Sackton, et al. A scan for positively selected genes in the genomes of humans and chimpanzees. PLoS Biol (2005) vol. 3 (6) pp. e170. PDF

 

Palmer, M. and T. B. Sackton. The effects of dietary coenzyme Q on Drosophila life span. Aging Cell (2003) vol. 2 (6) pp. 335-9. PDF

 

Sackton, T. B., R. A. Haney, and D. M. Rand. Cytonuclear coadaptation in Drosophila: disruption of cytochrome c oxidase activity in backcross genotypes. Evolution (2003) vol. 57 (10) pp. 2315-25. PDF

 

Rand, D. M., P. S. Spaeth, T. B. Sackton, and P. S. Schmidt. Ecological Genetics of Mpi and Gpi Polymorphisms in the Acorn Barnacle and the Spatial Scale of Neutral and Non-Neutral Variation. Integrative and Comparative Biology (2002) vol. 42 (4) pp. 825-836. PDF