Two LSUS students make startling scientific discovery, win prestigious award

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (KTAL/KMSS) – LSU Shreveport biology students recently experienced many firsts at a conference they attended in Michigan, including their first win in the scientific community.

Jonathan Eubanks and Hayden Hanna are biology students at LSU Shreveport. They say they did not expect to win the prestigious George B. Rabb Undergraduate Poster Award in evolution and genetics at the University of Michigan’s Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles 2024 conference.

Their study of genetic diversity among Chilean geckos landed them the victory.

“We had no clue that we would win,” said Eubanks, a biology senior from Elm Grove.

The research team had just finished eating Korean food for the first time when they found out the news. They rushed back to the campus.

The competition between amphibian and reptile giants like Michigan and the University of Florida was intense. But the LSU Shreveport team discovered higher-than-expected genetic diversity among Chilean geckos, and their research placed them at the top of 19 undergraduate research projects.

Their research is titled, “Phylogenetics and range-wide phylogeography of Garthia, a phylodactylid gecko genus endemic to Chile.”

This was Eubanks and Hanna’s first research project experience.

Hanna is a junior at LSU Shreveport, the president of the biology club, and a Shreveport native.

“I walked around the poster room and thought that we definitely weren’t going to win against all of these other schools that have a lot more funding and with established labs,” said Hanna.

But LSU Shreveport’s poster was pleasing to the eye and their research was solid.

The research at LSU Shreveport was funded by a grant and by the College of Arts and Sciences. Nielsen was able to travel to Chile and find Chilean scientists to work with. He and others collected Garthia gecko specimens in Chile and Nielson returned to the U.S. with a handful of specimens, mostly tail tips.

In their research, the team extracted DNA from the tips of Garthia gecko tail tips that were obtained in Chile and brought back to a laboratory at LSU Shreveport.

Eubanks and Hanna, under the leadership of Neilson, kept replicating mitochondrial DNA until there wasn’t enough left to study. They had the DNA sequenced and then looked into mutations in the genome.

Neilson said that with the DNA sequences, the team generated a tree and looked for clusters of gecko samples with similar DNA.

“My Chilean colleagues and I are super excited because we verified the species-level status of two species that had never been sequenced before, and discovered for the first time multiple cryptic species,” said Neilson.“Essentially, what we’ve long thought was a single, widespread species is actually composed of three, ‘cryptic,’ geographically-restricted, species-level lineages.”

Neilson also said they found “far more diversity than we currently recognized, and that was completely unexpected.”

“This project is huge for the school, for our students and for myself because it shows that LSUS does have a national and an international footprint,” Nielsen said. “The next step is having students going into the field with me to places like Chile and collect specimens.”

Hanna and Eubanks learned of the project in the LSU Shreveport Museum of Life Sciences. Since they began working on the project they have experienced their first trip out of the South, their first plane rides, their first research project experiences, their first wins in the field of science, and had a chance to try Korean barbeque.

Hanna is planning to become a college biology professor after attaining a master’s degree and a doctorate. Hanna is planning to focus on insects.

Eubanks is planning for a career in environmental science.

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