Collaborative Research: Phylogeny of Cnidaria - Convergent Evolution of Eyes, Gene Expression, and Cell Types

Texas A&M University, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

This project will improve knowledge of the evolutionary relationships of medusozoa (“jellyfish”) and the origin and evolution of eyes. Jellyfish are among the most distant relatives of humans that have eyes that still use genes similar to those used in human eyes. Within medusozoans, eyes originated separately at least nine times from a common genetic toolkit. This research will first expand knowledge of medusozoan relationships to untangle the complex evolutionary history of eyes. Next, this research will determine how similar are the genes expressed in each of the separately originated eyes. The team assembled for this project represents a new collaboration of scientists from multiple institutions with distinct but complementary expertise. The research will promote participation of women and underrepresented groups in all aspects of the project, will improve STEM education through training in integrative biology, and will incorporate the research in STEM undergraduate courses and a biodiversity workshop at a field station. The team will increase public engagement through educational articles and outreach activities, including integration of charismatic jellyfish into existing K12 outreach programs. Public outreach on the genetics of diverse eyes will also provide important information to improve understanding of important biological concepts and theories. Convergent evolution is a fascinating hallmark of biology that provides comparative biologists with replicated events in the otherwise singular history of life. Convergent traits that are also experimentally tractable, referred to as ‘meta-models’, provide opportunities for biologists to address questions about how repeatable evolution is at different levels of organization. This project will bring together a diverse group of collaborators to develop medusozoan cnidarians as a phylogenetic meta-model to address convergent evolution of eyes at different levels of organization, including genes, cells, and morphology. This award will support research to: a) test homology of eyes by generating a data-rich phylogeny that includes new transcriptomes of Medusozoa to reconstruct presence/absence of eyes across the group; b) compare gene expression profiles of convergently evolved eyes and other tissues (as controls) from cnidarians to identify conserved and convergent patterns of gene expression, and c) incorporate ‘tree-thinking’ into single-cell transcriptomics to analyze cell-type phylogenies and quantify histories of cell-types in convergently evolved eyes. Results form these studies will be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and presented at scientific meetings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.