Dr. Patrick Lemaire, University of Montpellier and CNRS, France
Dr. Patrick Lemaire, Senior Scientist at the University of Montpellier/CNRS, will present: "Digital ascidian embryos: natural variation and the logical rules of animal embryogenesis"
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Ascidians are marine invertebrates which belong to the vertebrate sister group. While adult ascidians show remarkable regenerative capacities, their embryos seem to be living on a different planet: they develop without growth or apoptosis, with a quasi-invariant cell lineage, conserved since the emergence of the group around 400 MY ago (Lemaire, 2011). Ascidian genomes, however, evolve particularly rapidly.To understand how distinct ascidian species can form very similar embryos despite the divergence of their genomes, we are combining experimental, mathematical and physical approaches (e.g., Guignard, Fiuza et al., 2020).During the talk, I will present our ongoing collaborative efforts with the Faure lab at LIRMM (Montpellier, F), the Malandain lab at INRIA, (Sophia Antipolis, F), and Mani lab at Northwestern University (Evanston, USA) to quantify natural variation within and between species during ascidian embryonic development, and our expectation of what natural variation in ascidian embryonic development could tell us more generally about the logic of animal embryonic development.
