Caiti’s research explores the evolutionary processes that create and maintain genetic variation. During her doctoral work she studied homologous meiotic recombination, which creates novel allele combinations for selection to act on and ensures proper chromosome segregation. Using empirical and computational approaches, she observed significant variation in recombination rates between closely related species of Drosophila and tested several mechanisms responsible for such change. She documented many differences between recombination in Drosophila compared to other organisms, including a lack of recombination hotspots, illustrating the incredible diversity in how organisms regulate and accomplish even essential mechanistic processes like meiosis.
During her postdoc she has studied how hybridization between different populations or species can generate genetic variation important for adaptation to new environments. Using yeast as a model, she has shown examples in which hybrids can select on one species allele to achieve increases in fitness. Hybridization is an underappreciated mechanism that can facilitate rapid adaptation, important for agricultural crops, industrial yeast, and for many natural populations facing increasingly disturbed habitats and climate change. She is excited to be starting her own lab in 2019 where she will utilize experimental evolution, comparative genomics, and genetic and genomic tools to continue pursuing questions in the fields of recombination and hybridization.