FACULT Y SPOTLIGHT
Courtship Condos
Dean Castillo P
laying to the ethic of pursuing pure science, new faculty member Dean Castillo’s lab is driven by research questions not necessarily the research organism. While working on his bachelor’s and even before that while growing up in rural northern California, he worked with “tons of different organisms,” he says, including fungi. So it wasn’t difficult for him as a geneticist to move from his earlier subjects such as tomatoes and nematodes at Indiana University, where he earned his PhD, to fruit flies (Drosophilia) during his postdoc at Cornell and now at the University of Utah.
The question for Castillo was the same: how do natural and sexual selection shape mating interactions and behaviors, species interactions, and ultimately speciation? The focus of Castillo, a recent faculty arrival at the School of Biological Sciences, remains evolutionary interactions between organisms, whether in “fruit” or the flies that feed on the yeast of that fruit. Genes determine behavior, and in the case of the fruit fly the female can mate with more than one male and store different sperm in different organ “storage areas” before determining which sperm will be used. How does that anatomically happen and what genes are motivating the female to determine which sperm is used? “Why does one female mate but another doesn’t?” he further asks. Once his lab determines how and where sperm from two different males is being stored in one female they will pursue other areas of inquiry: finding the genes that control female 2
