Thomas Kocher

Picture
Professor

Contact
Email: tdk@umd.edu
Office Phone: 301.405.4496
Lab: 301.405.6242
Fax: 301.314.9358
Office Address: 2132 Bioscience Research Building
URL: http://cichlid.umd.edu/cichlidlabs/kocherlab/index.html

Teaching
http://cichlid.umd.edu/cichlidlabs/kocherlab/teaching.html

BSCI 222 - Principles of Genetics (Fall semesters)

BIOL338K - Genetic Research on Cichlid Fishes

BIOL708J - Genomic Approaches in Ecology and Evolution (not currently taught)

Graduate Program Affiliations
  • BISI - BISI-Behavior, Ecology, Evolution, & Systematics (BEES)


Research Interests
http://cichlid.umd.edu/cichlidlabs/kocherlab/research.html

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 forphenotypic traits associated with speciation, such as jaw morphology, color pattern, sex determination and mate preferences. Our ultimate goalis to identify the genes responsible for speciation of these fishes, and to study the geographic distribution of allelic variants among populations in the wild.
Molecular evolution, population genetics, evolution of development, genetics of speciation, evolution of sex determination

Recent Publications
http://cichlid.umd.edu/cichlidlabs/kocherlab/publications.html

    2010
  • Soler L, Conte MA, Katagiri T, Howe AE, Lee BY, Amemiya C, Stuart A, Dossat C, Poulain J, Johnson J, Di Palma F, Lindblad-Toh K, Baroiller JF, D'Cotta H, Ozouf-Costaz C, Kocher TD. Comparative physical maps derived from BAC end sequences of tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus). BMC Genomics. 11:636.
  • Lee BY, Coutanceau JP, Ozouf-Costaz C, D'Cotta H, Baroiller JF, Kocher TD.  Genetic and physical mapping of sex-linked AFLP markers in Nile tilapia  (Oreochromis niloticus). Mar Biotechnol (NY). 2010 Oct 7. [Epub ahead of print]  PubMed PMID: 20953654.
  • Poletto AB, Ferreira IA, Cabral-de-Mello DC, Nakajima RT, Mazzuchelli J, Ribeiro HB, Venere, PC, Nirchio M, Kocher TD, Martins C. 2010. Chromosome differentiation patterns during cichlid fish evolution. BMC Genetics 11:50.
  • Lee BY, Howe AE, Conte MA, D’Cotta H, Pepey E, Baroiller J-F, di Palma F, Carleton KL, Kocher TD. 2010. An EST resource for tilapia based on 17 normalized libraries and assembly of 116,899 sequence tags. BMC Genomics 11:278.
  • Ferreira IA, Poletto AB, Kocher TD, Mota-Velasco J, Penman DJ, Martins C. 2010. Chromosome evolution in African cichlid fish: contributions from the physical mapping of repeated DNAs. Cytogenetic and Genome Research 129:314-322.
  • Shirak A, Grabherr M, Di Palma F, Lindblad-Toh K, Hulata G, Ron M, Kocher TD, Seroussi E. 2010. Identification of repetitive elements in the genome of Oreochromis niloticus: Tilapia repeat-masker. Marine Biotechnology 12: 121-125.
  • Ser J, Roberts RB, Kocher TD. 2010. Multiple interacting loci control sex determination in Lake Malawi cichlid fishes. Evolution 64:486-501.

    • 2009
  • Roberts RB, Ser J, Kocher TD. 2009 Sexual conflict resolved by invasion of a novel sex determiner in Lake Malawi cichlids. Science 326: 998-1001.

    • 2008
  • Cnaani A, Kocher TD.  2008. Sex-linked markers and microsatellite locus duplication in the cichlid speciesOreochromis tanganicae.  Biology Letters 4: 700-703
  • Loh, Y-H E, Katz, LS, Mims MC, Kocher TD, Yi S, Streelman JT. 2008. Comparative analysis reveals signatures of differentiation amid genomic polymorphism in Lake Malawi cichlids.  Genome Biology 9: R113
  • Shirak, A,  Golik M, Lee, B-Y,  Howe AE, Kocher TD, Hulata G, Ron M, Seroussi E. 2008. Copy number variation of lipocalin family genes for male-specific proteins in tilapia and its association with gender.  Heredity 101: 405-415.
  • Cnaani A,  Lee BY,  Zilberman N, Ozouf-Costaz C, Hulata F, Ron M, D’Hont A, Baroiller, J-F, D’Cotta H, Penman DJ, Tomasino E, Coutanceau J-P, Pepey E, Shirak A, Kocher TD. 2008. Genetics of sex determination in tilapiine species.  Sexual Development 2: 43-54.

    • 2007
  • DiPalma F, Kidd C, Borowsky R, Kocher TD. 2007.  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: 41-47.
  • Cnaani A, Lee BY, Ozouf-Costaz C, Kocher TD. 2007 Mapping of Sox2 and Sox14 in tilapia (Oreochromis spp.). Sexual Development 1: 207-210.
  • 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. Pp. 325-337 in J. Liu (ed.) Aquaculture Genome Technologies. Blackwell.

Education
B.A., Yale University, 1981
Ph.D., University of Colorado, 1986