Periodic Reporting for period 3 - EVOCELFATE (Evolution of cell fate specification modes in spiral cleavage)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-02-01 al 2023-07-31
This project tests the hypothesis that maternal chromatin and transcriptional regulators differentially incorporated in oocytes with autonomous spiral cleavage explain the evolution of this mode of cell fate specification. Through a comparative approach, we will combine bioinformatics, live imaging, and molecular and experimental techniques to: (i) Comprehensively identify differentially supplied maternal factors among spiral cleaving oocytes with distinct cell fate specification modes using comparative RNA-seq and proteomics; (ii) Uncover the developmental mechanisms driving conditional spiral cleavage, which is the ancestral embryonic mode; and (iii) Investigate how maternal chromatin and transcriptional regulators define early cell fates, and whether these factors account for the repeated evolution of autonomous specification modes.
Our results will fill a large knowledge gap in our understanding of spiral cleavage and its evolution. In a broader context, this project will deliver fundamental insights into two core questions in evo-devo: how early embryonic programs evolve, and how they contribute to phenotypic change.