Needs Analysis Workshop/Breakout group 2
Break-out Group 2: Evolution of morphology
Examples for driving research questions:
- What is the set of genes that are associated with a particular type of morphological change that occurred independently in several clades during evolution?
- Which genes are responsible for evolutionary change in the shape of a particular body part?
- What evolutionary phenotype mirrors a particular human disease?
Participants: Toby Kellogg, Austin Mast, Hans Hofmann, Arhat Abzhanov, Todd Vision, Wasila Dahdul, Hilmar Lapp, Peter Midford
TK - would like to avoid producing something that's too general to be useful
HH - provided an example of a workflow of research he conducts
HH - Molecular basis of chage in the brain as it relates to behavior; change meaning development, plasticity in adult, evolutionary change.
--have two populations that differ in escape response
--have knowledge of physiology, hormones, neural circuitry (morphology) ==> relates to M-cell
--questions: does it relate to ecology? if genetic changes occurred between populations, how did evolve?
--collect imaging data, have sparser data on electrophysiology time series
--M-cell --> extract RNA for profiling or CGH --> get candidate genes. Imaging issues
--kinds of data collected: expression imaging, histological sections, videos of behavior
--Interested in integrating across biological levels, literature, existing databases
TK - what is integration? how do you handle this data flow now?
HH - covariance matrix, examine c-turn behavior associated with a particular cluster of individuals, determine which candidate genes correspond
-- some genes don't cluster with his measures, so the database could fill in that information
