Skip navigation
EEB Home Page University of Arizona home page

Dr. C. William Birky, Jr., Professor

Positions and Education
Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, The University of Arizona, 1997-present
Chairman of the Graduate Interdepartmental Program in Genetics, The University of Arizona, 1997 - 2003
Professor, Genetics (now Molecular Genetics), The Ohio State University, 1976 - 1997
Member of Interdepartmental Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Program, The Ohio State University, 1970 - 1986
Associate Professor, Genetics, The Ohio State University, 1970 - 1976
Instructor, Assistant Professor, Zoology, and member of interdepartmental Genetics Program, University of California at Berkeley, 1964 - 1970
Ph.D., Embryology, Genetics, Biochemistry, Indiana University, 1963
B.A., Zoology, Indiana University, 1959
Honors and Awards
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (elected 1997)
President, American Genetic Association, 1992
Finalist, Outstanding Teaching Award of the Arts & Sciences Student Council, The Ohio State University, 1981, 1982
Hargitt Fellowship in Cell Biology, Duke University, 1977 - 78
Sigma Xi Faculty Research Award, The Ohio State University, 1972
National Institutes of Health Senior Research Fellowships, 1969 - 1970, 1987 - 1988, 1996

Research Interests

Bill Birky studies basic principles of evolution, molecular evolution, and genetics. He is especially interested asexual organisms and genomes and in organelle genes. He is studying speciation and selection by sequencing genes from different members of an ancient asexual lineage of invertebrates, the bdelloid rotifers, and comparing these to their sexual sister group, the monogonont rotifers. He also does theory on the evolution and genetics of asexual organisms and organelle genomes and the on evolutionary advantages of sex.

Visit Bill Birky's website.

PubMed list of pubications for Bill Birky
Selected Publications
  1. Birky, C. William, Jr., 1999. An even broader perspective on the evolution of sex. J. Evol. Biol. 12:1013-1016.
  2. Birky, C. William, Jr. 2001. The inheritance of genes in mitochondria and chloroplasts: Laws, mechanisms, and models. Annu. Rev. Genet. 35:125-148.
  3. Maughan, H., C. W. Birky,Jr, W. L. Nicholson, W. D. Rosenzweig, and R. H. Vreeland, 2002. The paradox of the ‘ancient’ bacterium which contains ‘modern’ protein-coding genes. Mol. Biol. Evol. 19:1637-1639.
  4. Barraclough, Timothy G., C. William Birky, Jr., and Austin Burt, 2003 Diversification in sexual and asexual organisms. Evolution 57:2166-2172.
  5. Birky, C. William, Jr. (2004) Bdelloid rotifers revisited. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 101:2651-2652.
  6. Birky, C. William, Jr., Cynthia Wolf, Heather Maughan, Linnea Herbertson, Elena Henry (2005) Speciation and selection without sex. Hydrobiologi (in press).
  7. Birky, C. William, Jr. (2005) Sex: Is Giardia doing it in the dark? Current Biology 15:R56-58
Older Publications
  1. Birky, C. William, Jr., and J. J. Gilbert, 1971 Parthenogenesis in rotifers: the control of sexual and asexual reproduction. Am. Zoologist 11:245-266.
  2. Birky, C. William, Jr. 1973 On the origin of mitochondrial mutants: Evidence for intracellular selection of mitochondria in the origin of antibiotic-resistant cells in yeast. Genetics 74:421-432.
  3. Birky, C. William, Jr., and Russell V.. Skavaril, 1976 Maintenance of genetic homogeneity in systems with multiple genomes. Genet. Res. 27:249-265.
  4. Backer, James S. and C. William Birky, Jr., 1985 The origin of mutant cells: Mechanisms by which Saccharomyces cerevisiae produces cells homoplasmic for new mitochondrial mutants. Curr. Genet. 9:627-640.
  5. Banks, Jo Ann, and C. William Birky, Jr., 1985 Chloroplast DNA diversity is low in a wild plant, Lupinus texensis. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 82:6950-6954.
  6. Birky, C. William, Jr., and J. Bruce Walsh, 1988 Effects of linkage on rates of molecular evolution. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 85:6414-6418.
  7. Birky, C. William, Jr., Paul Fuerst and Takeo Maruyama, 1989 Organelle gene diversity under migration, mutation, and drift: Equilibrium expectations, approach to equilibrium, effects of heteroplasmic cells, and comparison to nuclear genes. Genetics 121:613-627.
  8. Birky, C. William, Jr., 1994 Relaxed and stringent genomes: Why cytoplasmic genes don't obey Mendel's laws. J. Hered. 85:355-365.
  9. Birky, C. William, Jr., 1995 Uniparental inheritance of mitochondria and chloroplast genes: mechanisms and evolution. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 92:11331-11338.
  10. Rumpf, R., Vernon, D., Schreiber, D., and C. William Birky, Jr. 1996. Evolutionary consequences of the loss of photosynthesis in Chlamydomonadaceae: Phylogenetic analysis of Rrn 18 (18S rDNA) in 13 Polytoma strains (Chlorophyta). J. Phycol. 32:119-126.
  11. Vernon, Dawne, Robin Gutell, Jaime Cannone, Robert Rumpf, and C. William Birky, Jr., 2001. Accelerated evolution of functional plastid rRNA and elongation factor genes due to reduced protein synthetic load after the loss of photosynthesis in the chlorophyte alga Polytoma.. Mol. Biol. Evol. 18:1810-1822. [Experimental work done at Ohio State with extensive new analyses done at UA by me with Gutell and Cannone at U. Texas.]
  12. Lizhi Yu, C.. William Birky, Jr., and Rodney D. Adam, 2002. The two nuclei of Giardia each have complete copies of the genome as demonstrated by fluorescence in situ hybridization. Eukaryotic Cell 1:191-199. [Experimental work was done by postdoctoral fellow Lizhi Yu in Rod Adam’s lab in the Department of Medicine. I participated about equally with Rod Adam in conceiving the project and designing the experiments, and assisted Lizhi in interpreting the results.]
email the department email EEB tech support email the webmaster

EEB Help Search EEB About EEB

All contents copyright © 2003-2006 Arizona Board of Regents. All rights reserved.