Date
Sep 25, 2024, 12:00 pm1:00 pm
Audience
Free and open to the university community and the public.

Speaker

Details

Event Description

Abstract

The evolution of metazoan organisms over millions of years has led to remarkable complexity of form and function. While biologists have long studied the ultimate causes of biological diversity (i.e., why it originates), the proximate mechanisms underlying its emergence (i.e., how it arises) remain largely unknown. The goal of my lab is to uncover the genetic and developmental mechanisms underlying the establishment of phenotypic traits and to understand how these mechanisms have evolved to generate diversity across species. We achieve this by harnessing naturally evolved phenotypic variation in ‘non-traditional’ species and integrating multiple disciplines, including developmental biology, computational biology, and evolutionary genetics. For the past six years, our research has focused primarily on patterning and evolution of novelty in mammalian skin. In this talk, I’ll describe how my lab has developed new model systems to study two distinct spatially patterned phenomena during skin development - stripe pattern formation in rodents and gliding membrane formation in marsupials. Through the use of experimental embryology, transcriptomics, comparative genomics, and functional genetics, our work has yielded insights into the mechanisms by which phenotypic novelty is generated at the molecular level.

Biography

Ricardo Mallarino is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Originally from Bogota, Colombia, he graduated with a B.S. in Biology from Universidad de los Andes. He completed his graduate studies at Harvard in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in 2011, working with Arhat Abzhanov on developmental mechanisms underlying beak shape diversity in Darwin’s finches and their close relatives. After completing his PhD. he joined Hopi Hoekstra’s lab at Harvard, where he established a new model species and developed tools for studying the molecular basis of pigment pattern formation in mammals. Dr. Mallarino’s research focuses on understanding the genetic and developmental mechanisms by which form and structure are regulated during vertebrate embryogenesis and elucidating how these processes get modified during evolutionary time to produce phenotypic diversity.

Sponsor
Department of Molecular Biology
Contact
Butler Seminar Committee
Event Category
Butler Seminar Series