Nacho CABD Meeting

🎉 Nacho CABD Meeting 🧬

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

“Functional genomics of mole forelimb adaptation: a synthetic biology approach”

Here you have the summary of the talk:

Understanding how genomic mutations drive phenotypic evolution is a central question in modern biology. One striking example is the specialized morphology of mole forelimbs, adapted to fossorial environments. Our preliminary data suggest that these adaptations are associated with changes in the 3D-chromatin organization, regulation, and expression of the HOXD gene cluster, a key regulator of limb development. However, directly testing the functional relevance of these regulatory changes remains a major technological challenge. The aim of this project is to employ synthetic biology to reconstruct regulatory modifications observed in the mole HOXD cluster within transgenic mouse models, and to assess their phenotypic consequences in vivo. By introducing these specific regulatory variants into a controlled genetic background, we will be able to determine how such alterations impact gene expression and limb development. This approach provides a unique opportunity to experimentally validate the contribution of regulatory evolution to morphological diversification. Ultimately, this work seeks to bridge the gap between observations from comparative genomics analyses and their functional validation, offering insights into the mechanisms by which regulatory changes shape evolutionary novelties. Beyond its relevance to evolutionary biology, this methodology could establish a versatile framework for modeling evolutionary processes in vivo through synthetic genomic engineering.