Join the last ERGA BioGenome Analysis & Applications Seminar of the year! This time with a focus on functional genomics, featuring talks by Susana Coelho and Jaruwatana Sodai Lotharukpong. Don't miss it!
🕚 Wednesday, December 11th 2024 - 11:00 AM CET
Join us live on YouTube:
Abstract
Brown algae independently evolved sexual systems, complex multicellularity and (embryo) development, offering a unique perspective for exploring the general principles underlying the origin and evolution of these processes. Along with dozens of new reference genomes, the ongoing drive to generate transcriptomic data in brown algae have yielded new insights into shared developmental and evolutionary patterns across the tree of life, particularly the hourglass model. The hourglass model describes a recurring pattern in embryogenesis, where the evolutionarily divergent early and late embryonic stages are bridged by a conserved mid-embryonic period. In this talk, we present our recent findings of a transcriptomic hourglass in brown algae and discuss the bioinformatic challenges/solutions when working on non-model organisms.
About the speakers
Susana Coelho was born in Portugal and completed her PhD at the Marine Biological Association in the laboratory of Colin Brownlee (Plymouth, UK). She worked at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Roscoff (France) from 2006 where her lab focused in life cycle and reproduction of brown algae, and she had a key role in the establishment of the brown algae Ectocarpus as a model organism in evolutionary research. Between 2010 and 2020, she co-led the Algae Genetics Group in Roscoff, and was appointed Research Director at the CNRS in 2015. In 2020, she moved to Tubingen, Germany, where she is Director of the Algal Development and Evolution Department at the Max Planck Institute for Biology. Susana has led a number of large-scale research projects on the evolution and development of brown algae, including two ERC grants (SEXSEA and TETHYS), and she was awarded several prizes including the bronze medal of the CNRS (2015), the Trogoboff Prize of the French National Academy of Sciences (2017) and the Bettencourt Prize Coup d’Elan (2020).
Jaruwatana Sodai Lotharukpong is a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen. He was born in Japan, grew up in Thailand and completed his undergraduate and masters in London and Cambridge, respectively.
Related publication
Lotharukpong, J.S., Zheng, M., Luthringer, R. et al. A transcriptomic hourglass in brown algae. Nature 635, 129–135 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08059-8
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