From: ENS Lyon

Will give a seminar entitled:

Serial organ evolution – A developmental system’s view from teet

Serial organs are similar organs found at different places in the body, such as fore/hindlimbs or different teeth. They are bound to develop with the same genes, apart from identity genes.  Yet, serial organs can reach drastically different shapes in the same individual and are hotspots of diversification. To study how such differentiated shapes can develop and evolve, we studied the innovation of mouse upper molar shape. Instead of the traditional genetics approach, we are focusing on the dynamics of the developmental system’s, which we compare and quantify using dedicated tools, in particular advanced transcriptomics. Our results show how a morphogenetic identity of lower and upper molars was conserved throughout evolution, and likely reused to evolve a new phenotype in the upper molar only. We also show how evolving this new upper molar phenotype likely drove the evolution of the lower molar developmental system, due to concerted evolution of the two systems. We believe that such developmental system drift works hand in hand with modularity to enable the independent evolution of organs under pervasive pleiotropy.

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