Patrick Lemaire Email & Phone Number

Biologists have long been puzzled by the different rates of morphological evolution of animal species. Why do some taxa undergo rapid morphological changes while others, such as the coelacanth, can keep very similar morphologies over hundreds of millions of years? The research team I am heading is exploring the complex relationships between genotype and phenotype, at the crossroads of developmental biology, computational biology, evolutionary biology and cell biology. We use as a model system the embryos of ascidians because of the anatomical and genomic simplicity of these marine invertebrates, which are closely related to vertebrates. Ascidian embryos develop, like most nematodes, with a fixed cell lineage, which is remarkably well conserved between all studied species, even those whose genomes have extensively diverged during 500 million years of parallel evolution. Ascidians thus offer a unique opportunity to decipher the developmental programme of a chordate with a cellular level of resolution, and to understand how genomic plasticity is compatible with morphological conservation. To identify genome-scale and gene regulatory network features explaining the striking evolutionary stability of ascidian morphogenesis, we combine advanced quantitative imaging with genome sequencing, epigenetics, gene expression and cis-regulatory analyses.Our work is primarily supported by the #CNRS and the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (#ANR). Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4925-2009

Listed skills include Developmental Biology, Life Sciences, Science, Molecular Biology, and 15 others.