Life on Earth displays a breathtaking diversity of forms — from the armoured shell of a turtle to the elaborate filtering apparatus of a lamprey larva; from the paired fins of a shark to the complex brain of a mammal.
To address how genuinely new structures arise, the Comparative Developmental Genomics Lab combines genomics, transcriptomics and evolutionary developmental biology in a comparative approach to study key evolutionary transitions across animals, with a special focus on jawless vertebrates such as hagfish and lampreys, and non-model organisms like turtles.