RUI: Patterning divergent development in the pea aphid

生物体发展成为复杂的多细胞生物体，部分原因是在发育中的卵子和胚胎早期开启基因，这些基因用于指导单个细胞识别它们的身份。蚜虫是一种昆虫，根据季节（例如，夏季与秋季），有性蚜虫与无性蚜虫的后代发育过程非常不同。有性蚜虫在叶子上产卵，而无性蚜虫活产，这导致这些蚜虫的子卵和胚胎发育方式（蛋黄量，细胞数量和大小，事件时间等）的巨大差异。这是发育可塑性的一个极端例子，在这种情况下，由于环境的变化，发育发生了改变，而基因组没有变化。PI，他的合作者和学生使用分子工具来检测涉及有性与无性蚜虫后代发育关键步骤的基因表达差异。这项工作的目标是继续描述这些差异的程度，这些努力应该加深我们对早期发育如何在不改变基因组的情况下发生巨大变化的理解。这项工作将在一个主要的本科院校进行，因此另一个目标是培养本科生在发育生物学学科内设计和执行假设驱动的实验和数据分析。

Organisms develop into complex, multicellular organisms in part by turning on genes early in the developing egg and embryo that serve to instruct individual cells as to their identities. Aphids are a type of insect that reproduce either sexually or asexually depending on the season (e.g., summer versus fall) and the process by which the progeny of sexual versus asexual aphids develop is very different. Sexual aphids lay eggs on leaves while asexual aphids give live birth and this results in dramatic differences in how the daughter eggs and embryos of these aphids develop (amount of yolk, number and size of cells, timing of events, etc.). This represents an extreme case of developmental plasticity, in which development has been altered due to changes in the environment with no change in the genome. The PI, his collaborators, and students have used molecular tools to detect differences in the expression of genes involved in key steps in the development of the progeny of sexual versus asexual aphids. The goal of this work is to continue to characterize the extent of these differences and these efforts should deepen our understanding of how early development can be dramatically altered without changing the genome. The work will take place at a predominantly undergraduate institution and thus an additional objective is to train undergraduate students in the design and execution of hypothesis-driven experimentation and data analysis within the discipline of developmental biology.