Kirsten Boyer Email and Phone Number

Outdoor education at its finest! I lead kayak tours through the Elkhorn Slough and Monterey Bay, often with student groups from California schools.

I taught a Cellular and Molecular Biology lab section, where the students learn key molecular biology lab skills such as DNA extraction, protein extraction, PCR, enzyme activity assays, gel electrophoresis for proteins and for DNA, plasmid transformations of bacteria, and ELISA techniques.

Global warming is reducing the availability of suitable thermal habitat for many species, causing distribution shifts that can lead to crowding and increased antagonistic interactions with conspecifics. Crowding has been shown to cause physiological stress in aquaculture, but the extent to which this applies in natural systems is less known. To test the hypothesis that crowding will lead to increased physiological stress, I used the intertidal porcelain crab Petrolisthes cinctipes as a model. P. cinctipes is a common inhabitant of intertidal zone boulder habitats, and can be found at densities of above 1000 individuals per square meter. To simulate crowding, crabs were placed in density treatments that reflect high, medium, and low densities seen in the field for 24 hours, after which gene expression was measured for six molecular biomarkers of physiological stress (i.e., heat shock genes), as well as two housekeeping genes used as a normalization control. Principal component analysis of all gene expression data revealed a significant effect of crowding on overall gene expression patterns, indicating that the crabs experienced measurable physiological stress in response to increased crowding. As climate change progresses, the thermal habitat of these crabs will likely be compressed further, leading to higher population densities than are currently observed in the field and increasing crowding stress. These data suggest that global climate change has the potential to indirectly impact the physiology of organisms based on shifts in distribution and changes in intraspecific interactions.

-phylogenetic analysis of the AP-1 transcription factor-qPCR gene expression analysis of AP-1 transcription factor in heat-stressed Acroporid corals from Ofu, American Samoa