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I am happy to present our new preprint "Gene family evolution underlies cell type diversity in the hypothalamus of teleosts" with @hilsawh and @schierlab! https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.13.414557v1
I am fascinated by the question of how cell types evolve - and I think teleost brains are a great place to look...
Why fish? Teleost fish represent the largest and most diverse radiation of vertebrates - this is likely due to their lineage-specific whole-genome-duplication, which generated a ton of genetic material for evolution to work on
When we compared the cell types in the hypothalamus of zebrafish and Mexican cavefish (A. mexicanus), we found that gene family evolution (gene duplication/loss) affected the transcriptomes of both orthologous and species-specific cell types!
The reason we chose the cavefish was b/c it comes in two flavours: a regular looking surface-morph, and a cave-morph that is missing both eyes and pigmentation. Cave-morphs display extensive behavioural adaptations linked to the hypothalamus.
In addition to our cross-species comparison, we also generated an atlas of the cellular, transcriptomic, and genomic differences between surface- and cave-morphs, and found accelerated cell-type evolution associated with cave-adaptation!
Thanks to those directly involved ( @hilsawh, @schierlab), funding ( @snf_ch, @biozentrum, @CIHR_IRSC), lab members ( @annika_nichols_, @bushranraj, @ljljolin), & @WSalzburger and @GrayCampLab for helpful comments on the manuscript! Enjoy!
