Now you see it, now you don't. Most ninespine sticklebacks have a complete pelvic girdle (top), but fish from several populations have lost this complex structure (bottom). This is a major evolutionary change - the pelvis is the developmental equivalent of the legs of land animals.
Genetics of variation. Many breeds of domestic pigeon have crests of reversed feathers on the back of the head and neck. The same genetic change probably acts as an "on/off" switch for crest development in different breeds.
The Genetic and Developmental Basis of Evolutionary Change
What are the genetic and developmental origins of unique traits in natural populations and species of vertebrates? In most cases of trait evolution in natural and domesticated species, we do not know how many genes are involved, which genes are actually responsible for morphological change, whether alterations to these genes affect coding or regulatory regions, or whether the same genes are involved repeatedly in the evolution of similar traits in different populations and species. Our work addresses these major issues.
News
5/13 |
Congrats to Sara Fauver and Anna Vickrey! Both were awarded summer inernships by the University Research Opportunities Program. |
4/13 |
Mike and Eric's "Quick Guide" to domestic pigeons appears in the April 24 issue of Current Biology. Click here to download the pdf. |
4/13 |
Anna Vickrey was awarded the 2013 Stephen D. Durrant Scholarship. Congratulations, Anna! |
3/13 |
Sydney is featured in a Science Cover Stories article for her Old Dutch capuchine cover photo in the March 1 issue. |
2/13 |
Mike gave the annual public Darwin Lecture at NYU. |
2/13 |
Casandra Garner joined the lab as a rotation student in the Molecular Biology Program. |
2/13 |
We hosted an outreach activity for the Society for Developmental Biology's "Choose Development" program. |
2/13 |
Eric and Anna presented their research at the Southwest Regional Society for Developmental Biology meeting. |
2/13 |
Check out Carl Zimmer's excellent article in the New York Times about our pigeon genetics research! The Times also published an educational activity to accompany the story. |
1/13 |
New publication in Science from our collaboration with Mark Yandell's lab, BGI, and the University of Copenhagen: Genomic diversity and evolution of the head crest in the rock pigeon. See the press coverage here. |
1/13 |
Eric Domyan has been awarded an NIH/NRSA postdoctoral fellowship - congratulations, Eric! |
1/13 |
Mike presented a pigeon-omics talk in the next-generation sequence annotation and analysis session at the Plant and Animal Genomes conference in San Diego. |
1/13 |
Della Fixsen joined the lab as a rotation student in the Molecular Biology Program. |
1/13 |
Mike and Anna presented new research at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting in San Francisco. |
1/13 |
Sara Fauver joined the lab as an ACCESS researcher. |
12/12 |
A figure from our Current Biology pigeon population genetics paper was chosen by WIRED as one of the Best Scientific Figures of 2012! |
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