| 研究実績の概要 |
How morphological innovations originate during evolution is still an unanswered big question in biology. The turtle shell is one such morphological innovations, one that we can tackle in the laboratory as a model for answering this important conundrum. The original purpose of my project was to determine the regulatory regions that allowed such genes to acquire their new expression domain during evolution, leading to the turtle shell innovation. During the first fiscal year I was able, by means of ChIP-seq against histone modifications (which define the active/repress state of the chromatin) to distinguish hundreds of promoters and thousands of enhancers from three different tissues: boddy walls, limbs and the carapacial ridge (CR) - the embryonic structure that gives rise to the carapace-, of which around 500 hundred are specifically active in the CR. During the second fiscal year, I have further advanced the project by analyzing the data from other two species, chicken and mouse, defining their promoters and enhancers in the equivalent tissues of those of turtle: dorsal flanks, body walls and limbs. The results I have been able to obtain during my research are very promisint, and future inter-species comparisons will allow me to determine those enhancers that are turtle-specific and that hence candidates for further tests. The origin of these regulatory elements during turtle evolution might explain how an amniote embryo such as that of turtles could distort the body plan in such a way as to generate a totally new form.
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