Joyce Miller

Professional Experience

Before I became a Technology Specialist at a patent law firm, I used to be a Research Scientist at the Whitehead Institute / M.I.T. Center for Genome Research, and the Group Leader on the Mouse Genomic Map project, which is part of the Human Genome Project. The Mouse Map had two distinct phases. The first was to build a genetic map of the mouse, composed of 6000 PCR-typeable simple sequence length polymorphisms (SSLPs). Once done, this genetic map served as the scaffold for the mouse physical map, which was the second phase of the project. The physical map was based on those 6000 previously-mapped markers, plus an additional 4000 sequence tagged sites (STSs), all tested against a 40,000-clone mouse YAC library.

The mouse genetic map was completed in the spring of 1996. We also cross-located 1500 of our genetic markers on the Copeland-Jenkins gene-based map, thereby increasing the power of both maps. Work on the mouse physical map is finished. You can view our genetic map, or visit the Jackson Laboratory's Encyclopedia of the Mouse Genome, which contains a great deal more genetic information on the mouse. Another group doing work similar to ours is the Medical Research Council's Mouse Genome Centre in England.

As an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I majored in Botany, and graduated in 1982 with a Bachelor's of Science (cum laude). While there, I taught laboratory sections of Botany 100 (for science majors) and 101 (for non-majors). I also did an Honors Thesis with Dr. David Mulcahy in the Botany Department (it's the Biology Department now), studying the expression and inheritance of the enzymes within single pollen grains in Cucurbita (squash). My thesis was selected for a Sigma Xi Undergraduate Research Award in 1982.

After graduating from UMass, I went to graduate school at the Department of Plant Breeding at Cornell University in beautiful Ithaca, New York. I worked on a variety of different projects, and had more bad luck than most grad students do with research projects not working out. I actually went through three different advisors and five distinct thesis topics during the 5 1/2 years I was there. It actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I ended up with Dr. Steven D. Tanksley, a leader in the field. I worked on expanding a genetic linkage map of the tomato, a project which had been started by a postdoc of Steve's, Robert Bernatzky, who is now a professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at... UMass/Amherst (small world, eh?). After working on the tomato map for a year, I used the markers on it to explore the evolutionary relationships among cultivated tomatoes and their wild relatives, and managed to do all my thesis work in only three years.

It took a large amount of DNA data to resolve differences, especially between the cultivated tomato strains (which are very closely related). Pushing such a large amount of data (DNA from 156 individual plants, cut with 5 different restriction enzymes, and examined at 40 chromosomal locations) through the appropriate equations was very difficult, and led me to my first postdoctoral appointment after receiving my Ph.D. in November of 1988. If you're crazy enough to want the raw data from my thesis, you can have it.

This postdoctoral fellowship was with Dr. Masatoshi Nei, who is an authority in the field of evolutionary genetics. He's now at Penn State University, in the Biology Department, but in 1989, he was in the Department of Demographics and Population Genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. The laboratory costs involved in doing molecular evolution were getting cheaper all the time, and many other scientists were having the same trouble I had with processing large amounts of data. I spent the next year in Houston writing a series of computer programs to do these evolutionary analyses. It's written in C, and the package is called RESTSITE (short for RESTriction SITE data). It's available for public use, so feel free to download it if you do this sort of research.

After finishing the RESTSITE software package, I took another postdoctoral fellowship position, in the Department of Agronomy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. While I was there, I worked on a genetic linkage map of mustard and related species (canola, mustard, broccoli, cauliflower, etc.). I left Madison in 1991 for a position at the Whitehead Institute.

My e-mail address is:

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