Congratulations Camilla Whittington

Camilla Whittington with sea horses University of Sydney

Viviparity and pregnancy has evolved numerous times and Camilla Whittington has set herself the ambitious task to seek similarities in gene expression that support pregnancy in sea horses, viviparous lizards and marsupial mammals. Her paper on the transcriptome of the brood pouch of a male sea horse was highlighted in a previous post.

Now I am delighted to report that Camilla has been awarded a Fondation L'Oréal Women in Science Fellowship. It is good that this award exists and especially encouraging that research in comparative biology of pregnancy has become known to a wider public through the publicity surrounding Camilla's Award.

Sea horses from Camilla's web site

To learn more about Camilla's Work visit her web site. For hard science you can read about the comparative genomics of hormone signalling in the chorioallantoic membrane here.

Genome of the spotted gar

Spotted gar (Lepisosteus oculatus)
Brian Gratwicke  CC BY 2.5 (Wikimedia Commons)

Not all bony fish are teleosts. Teleostei is an infraclass of ray-finned fish (Actinopterygii) with bichirs, sturgeons and gars (some 50 species) all basal to to the more numerous teleosts (some 30,000 species). The phylogeny of bony fishes has been largely resolved by Near et al. (open access).

Alligator gar (Atractosteus spatula) Moon Lake, Mississippi. March 1910, Photographer D. Franklin,
American Museum of Natural History (public domain)

 

Romer's Man and the Vertebrates did not make much of garpikes, but did include a great photo (shown above) of the largest species. My yellowing copy predates the genetic code yet alone genomics.

What we now know is that teleosts are characterized by the Teleost Gene Duplication (TGD). This event was followed by rapid sequence evolution that may explain their success as a group. It can, however, make it difficult to identify orthologs to tetrapod genes and frustrate interpretation of data obtained in zebra fish (Danio rerio). To provide a bridge, Braasch et al. have sequenced and have just published the genome of the spotted gar (open access).

To my knowledge no living species of the gar family is viviparous.