Dlx gene contributions to craniofacial patterning during development and evolution

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Understanding how changes in animal genomes permitted the evolution of the staggering diversity of life on earth is a major challenge in modern biology. A major prediction from the field of evolutionary developmental biology is that the differences between groups of animals can be traced to variations in embryonic development. Understanding how functional changes in genes that regulate development might change body structures is an important goal of our research. One means by which new gene functions might have emerged over evolutionary timescales is via the duplication of existing genes. This is thought to have happened on a large scale in a lineage of animals that evolved into the vertebrates (animals, like us, with backbones). Looking at animals alive today, we find that invertebrates like insects often have a single version of a particular gene, whereas humans and other vertebrates usually have multiple related genes that carry out derived functions depending upon where in the body they are active. Using a combination of established and novel techniques of molecular genetics, we propose to study how the Dlx family of regulatory genes function together to provide positional information to cells in the developing jaws of birds, such that the upper and lower jaws develop normally. To ask whether avian Dlx proteins have evolved new functions or whether more ancient Dlx functions were co-opted into new embryonic tissues, we will also ask whether bird embryos can recognize the information coded in the single version of the Dlx gene from a fruit fly or a non-vertebrate chordate. This work will improve our knowledge of the mechanisms that control animal development at the molecular level and how changes to gene expression or function may have impacted animal form over evolutionary timescales.