Needs Analysis Workshop/Chalk talks

From phenoscape

Notes from chalk talks:

  • John Lundberg:
    • ~30,000 teleost species
    • ostariophysi most important group of freshwater fish
  • Arhat Abzhanov:
    • works on craniofacial evolution
    • drivers and evolution of cranial development
    • variation; beak development and diversification (morphs) among Galapagos finches
    • comparative relationships of developmental pathways of interacting and regulatory genes
  • Hans Hofman:
    • individual variation in gene expression, pathways, physiology, anatomy, behaviour, etc
    • variation at the population and species level, such as ecology, biogeography, natural history, etc
    • how to link these two through, for example, a data repository
    • how to implement the ability for open-ended queries (when we don't know what questions might be)
    • how to connect this to development time, plasticity, genotype/environment interactions
  • Toby Kellogg:
    • grasses have about 10,000 species, e.g., rice, maize
    • which meristem-specific genes have been conserved or evolutionarily changed
    • challenge: how to get from a list of candidate genes (involved in floresence) to the 3'UTR to use for in-situs for same or different species?
    • designing primers for an entire clade based on a multiple alignment
    • automating the pipeline is desire and major challenge
  • Austin Mast:
    • MorphBank
    • Images provide greater information than what we can put into words
    • Slide-server interface
    • bulk annotation, 'tile' layout
  • Elizabeth Jockusch:
    • beetle devo-evo; antennae divided into: scape (1), pedicel (1), flagellum (typically 9 segments, but many exceptions)
    • Tribolium: flagellum -> funicle and club, with variable number of segments
    • candidate genes; using RNAi to induce changes (phenotypes) in 5 sp of Tribolium
    • e.g. reduced number of antenna segments, why? e.g. fusions of antenna segments, deletions, failure to form? (empirical devo Q's)
    • how to code these phenotypes so one can ask for broader patterns, non-randomness?
  • Chuck Kimmel:
    • Important: role of cells in forming skeletal shape
    • what are the activities of cells controlled by developmental genes
    • devo hypothesis: modular assembly?
    • what is the broad nature of shape diversity (of, e.g., certain bones)
    • evo hyothesis: a missing module?
    • how could a database help with the shape transformation; how to code cells and cell activity into process? Retrieval of hypotheses vs. facts
  • Günter Wagner:
    • evolution of limbs, gene duplication in teleosts, internal development of human
    • following the genes to the taxa they lead to
    • comparative cell morphology and cell physiology
    • what to compare to in organisms that don't have a particular cell type? e.g. myelinated cells comparing to lampreys (which have only glial cells)
  • David Stern (Tuesday):
    • parsing out categories of morphological features (morphology, physiology, behavior, etc.); trait differences between Drosophila species
    • list of mutations that cause phenotypic differences
    • experimental evidence for the role of mutation
    • database of evolutionary mutations and their phenotypes fixed through drift or selection (EvolGen)
  • Hopi Hoekstra (Tuesday):
    • genetic basis for variation
    • classify phenotypic variation (pigment, morphology (e.g. tail length), behavior)
    • Peromyscus trait evolution