Rubén CABD Meeting

🎉 Rubén CABD Meeting 🧬

This Monday, our PhD student Rubén had the opportunity to present the latest progress on his thesis project at the CABD meeting. His talk is titled:

“Exploring Mole’s Pseudodigit Development in Talpa occidentalis”

Here you have the summary of the talk:

Over 560 million years ago, early fishes lacked appendages, but evolution introduced paired fins and later two sets of paired fins. Around 375 million years ago, the water to land transition began, leading to the development of the ancestral autopod. Since then, the autopod has evolved, adopting different shapes while following a common trend of digit reduction.

Unlike this common trend of digit reduction within tetrapods, moles have five digits plus a pseudodigit. The latter lacks phalanges like a true digit and has been classified as an enlarged sesamoid bone, but it retains mobility, which highlights its functionality. It contributes to the broadening of the hand, which is likely very helpful for digging, as moles are fossorial animals. This unique feature led us to question which molecular mechanisms drive its developmental and evolutionary origin.

To explore this, we are using single-cell technologies to study cell type–specific gene expression and cis-regulatory elements in the mole species Talpa Occidentalis. We also plan to perform comparative genomics with other members of the Talpidae family to gain evolutionary insights into this trait. In this talk, I’ll present our progress analyzing scRNA-seq data from mole and mouse limbs.