Needs Analysis Workshop/Chalk talks

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