#  HUH Seminar Series - Julia Van Etten 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **March 4, 2026** 

 12:00PM - 01:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **HUH Seminar Room 125, 22 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA**  

Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/yc5xcmak

 

 

 



 

   ![Julia Can Etten](/sites/g/files/omnuum6796/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-02/JVE.jpg?itok=MJdd5zvP) 

 

[**Julia Van Etten**](https://www.vanettenlab.org/)  
NSF PRFB Fellow, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute  
Incoming Assistant Professor, University of Maryland - College Park

**Title**: The ecology of horizontal processes: Lessons learned from community gene transfer, alignment-free phylogenomics, and the photosynthetic *Paulinella* amoeba

**Abstract:** The “tree of life” is a generally bifurcating scheme for understanding descent and ancestry of extant taxa. Much of the data within genomes is transferred vertically from parent to offspring, but sometimes nucleic acids incorporate horizontally, within a generation, into new genomes. This creates a tree of life that appears web-like at finer resolution. The transfers that build this web can range from bits of non-coding DNA, to whole operons and chromosomes, to organisms themselves (that become organelles). In this seminar, I will present results from past work that addressed horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in two different ways: one looked at the outcomes of specific adaptive HGT events in an alga and what this might tell us about the broader microbial community’s ability to detoxify heavy metals; the other used an alignment-free method to look at all taxa from that same community and how they are linked by the DNA transferred between them. I will also discuss implementation of an alignment-free phylogenomic pipeline, highlighting its utility for discovering novel species and its potential application in analyzing museum, herbarium, and ancient DNA. Last, I will share recent findings from a novel *Paulinella* species, a unique amoeba and the only known organism outside the Archaeplastida lineage to evolve photosynthesis via primary endosymbiosis.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Herbaria Seminar Series ](/calendar/taxonomy/term/20301)
 
 

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