Speakers

Theme one, day 1

Brave new world? What is Darwin’s legacy in the era of modern medicine and technology-based societies?

Speaker: Professor Michael Akam, University Museum of Zoology Cambridge, UK: From genomes to the diversity of life and our current understanding of evolution

Professor Michael Akam is a developmental geneticist with a particular interest in the generation of morphological diversity. Most of his work is with arthropods, much of which concerns the role of the ‘Hox’ family of developmental regulatory genes. In particular, how their regulation and expression leads to the range of different segment morphologies in Drosophila; how changes in the role of Hox genes may be related to the pattern of segment diversity in other insects, in crustaceans and in myriapods.

Akam and his team also study the diversity of patterning mechanisms in insects – by comparing species that appear to make embryos in very different ways (e.g. flies and locusts).

The team uses a range of genetic and embryological techniques including transgenesis, descriptive molecular embryology and the analysis of cell lineage. Increasingly, DNA sequences and genomic organisation are providing the phylogenetic framework against which to test hypotheses of evolutionary mechanisms.

Akam and his team are using molecular data from the Hox gene clusters to explore the relationships of protostome phyla and classes, and he welcomes colleagues who approach these same questions with other techniques.

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