The Biological Challenges of Freezing Environments
Freezing environments present challenges to the functioning of a wide range of biological systems and I am interested in building genomic insight into these challenges across taxa that have been "Stuck in the Cold." This is both to understand the mechanisms of adaptation to extreme cold environments, and to investigate the extent to which living things have answer an abiotic question with the same adaptive solution. Prior and ongoing work involves existing genomic resources for the cryonotothenioid fishes, computationally dissecting these for insight into challenges of life in the cold. |
The Consequences of Evolution in the Cold
Fishes that have evolved in chronic cold waters have come to show a consistent reduction in heat tolerance compared to closely related temperate species. At the cellular level this reduction in tolerance is reflected in the atrophy of critical transcriptional responses to heat stress that may leave these animals poorly equipped to deal with a warming world. I'm interested in exploring the triggers that lead to such atrophy, and the genetic routes through which this loss occurs, both for insight into the resilience of cold fish in a warming world. Current work is focused on looking at the evolution of heat responding pathways among a diverse group of Arctic fishes. |
Evolutionary Innovation in the Cold
The strong selective pressure from freezing has repeatedly led to the evolution of novel defenses against this environmental threat. In the marine realm we see this in the independent evolution of antifreeze proteins that now fortify disparate lineages of fish from the threat of inoculative freezing. Several lineages of amphibians show an even more extreme adaptation in their capacity to survive periods of organismal freezing. I'm interested in studying such evolutionary innovations for insight into the genomic basis of novel traits. |