Corbin Jones
Principal Investigator
Corbin Jones Eats Bugs Like You for Breakfast
Corbin received his PhD from the University of Rochester under the 
mentorship of Allen Orr. His thesis work focused on the genetics of natural adaptation using Drosophila sechellia, a unique fly species that thrives off the fruit of a plant called Morinda citrifolia. Surprisingly, this fruit is quite toxic to D. sechellia’s closest evolutionary siblings, as well as all other arthropods tested thus far. Corbin plans to identify the molecular basis for these species-specific differences in here at the Jones lab by using modern molecular tools. As a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of David Begun at the University of California at Davis, Corbin continued his interest in molecular evolution through the study of genome organization, the evolution of new genes, and interactions between adaptation and recombination. Along the way, he has developed theoretical and statistical methods to study evolutionary genomics such as (i) estimating the gene number underlying a quantitative trait, (ii) identifying spatial patterns in DNA sequence evolution, (iii) ways to detect genetic changes due to natural selection, and (iv) the role of meiosis in evolution. In collaboration with Begun and others, Corbin continues to pursue these goals.
Corbin is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department of the University of North Carolina as well as an Associate Professor of the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences (CCGS). He is also a Faculty Director of the UNC High-Throughput Sequencing Facility.