Needs Analysis Workshop/Breakout group 1
Break-out Group 1: Developmental genetics of morphology
Examples for driving research questions:
- Which genes are known to be expressed in the development of a particular morphological structure?
- Is there a model organism mutant that has a phenotype similar to a human disease?
Characters
GW - describe natural units - not necessarily arbitrary - can phenotype be decomposed into natural mechanistic units
CK - could ontology hold you back from describing some things
GW - can lead to confusion
EJ - this database can be a way of discovering these units
GW - would database be like GenBank - I could describe a fish and deposit my phenotypes - structure of data would be fluid
PM - data is representation of current knowledge - can change over time
GW - how is change in knowledge, like of orthology statements, handled in genome databases
Manually updated, typically
MW - We should move above mechanics and focus on biological questions
EJ - how can we use data to identify discrete modules of variation within evolution
GW - taxonomic work in mammals often involves tooth characters - usually cusps are individualized - actually character identity should be attached to tooth type rather than cusp as unit character - resolves many homology issues
Question: See same tooth type evolving again and again. Developmentally, cusps don't come and go individually. - see covariance within mutants query for mutants that affect cusp X - always see that other cusp is affected
GW - Homology and analogy
- often too "yes or no"
- instead could have "character model"
- contain kind of cells within, location in body, relation to other characters, what kind of states can it assume - represent variational tendencies of a chunk of the body
- avoid simplifying biological reality - open-ended structure
