That's the case with a group of researchers on the Hilltop and Medical campuses who've won a Packard Foundation grant of $1 million over five years to launch a unique study of evolution and development.

Photo by David Kilper

Jeremy Gibson-Brown, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, meets Morton, a bearded dragon. Gibson-Brown is one of five University collaborators researching the evolution and developmental genes of distant cousins of Morton, Anolis lizards.

To illustrate it, consider Jeremy Gibson-Brown, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences and one of the researchers involved in the project comprising top-notch geneticists and evolutionary biologists. Gibson-Brown had just become a faculty member in the summer of 2000 when he took an urgent phone call from new colleague Jonathan B. Losos, Ph.D., professor of biology, at Gibson-Brown's research site along the Florida gulf coast.

Gibson-Brown, a developmental biologist in the University's Evolutionary and Population Biology Program, was collecting amphioxus embryos for his work in trying to understand the development of that animal's fin, which, in lizards (critters that evolved from fish), is a limb. Losos asked Gibson-Brown if he would be interested in joining a team in a proposal to the Packard Foundation.

In brief, the program would analyze the evolution of Anolis lizards, common in the Caribbean, in conjunction with the evolution of their development system.

"Ironically, that very day I'd stumbled across some Anolis lizard eggs on the ground and out of curiosity had removed part of the egg shell to see what I could of the organism," Gibson-Brown said. "Jonathan and Kerry Kornfeld in the School of Medicine were pulling together a very impressive team to research an area that is a natural for me. I'm interested in how the basic genetics of all animals have been tinkered with over time to bring about the great diversity in the animal kingdom."

In addition to Gibson-Brown, Losos and development specialist Kornfeld, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular biology and pharmacology in the School of Medicine, the University researchers also include famed evolutionary biologists Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., professor of genetics in the medical school and professor of biology, and James M. Cheverud, Ph.D., professor of anatomy and neurobiology and of genetics in the medical school.

They make up one of just 10 out of 50 nationwide interdisciplinary teams to get funded in the new Packard program called Interdisciplinary Science. The program awards proposals that are novel and holistic in approach and create more integration among scientists.

The idea was hatched over breakfast meetings between Losos and Kornfeld, local high school classmates who ended up teaching and researching in their hometown at the University. Kornfeld works primarily out of the School of Medicine, Losos out of Arts & Sciences.

The likelihood was not great that the old friends would be able to collaborate until they learned of the special Packard Foundation program and began formulating a team.

"The beauty of the program is that it allows people who might normally not be able to work together to actually come up with a plan that draws upon the strengths of different people," Losos said. "For instance, I've done lots of work in evolution, but many of the unanswered questions from my work need a developmental solution."

There is not much genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees, Losos explained, but biologists agree that the big difference between the two is that somehow there have been changes in genes that affect the developmental process so that the outcome during development is a different organism. The most basic level of understanding evolution requires an understanding of how DNA actually changes, what happens as the embryo develops and the organism grows.

The merging of evolution and development is one of biology's hottest new fields, made possible just recently by breakthroughs in developmental biology that give clues to what genes code for proteins during development. The next step is to examine related organisms and ask: What are the DNA changes that have changed the developmental pathway during evolution?

Model development organisms are problematic because evolution and development biologists use different kinds -- development biologists focus on Drosophila, C. elegans, Arabidopsis and mice, for instance; evolutionary biologists look at groups of species that show ecological and morphological (body shape) diversity, the Galapagos finches or African Rift Lake cichlid fishes, for instance.

The University research group of evolutionary and developmental biologists is integrating these biological branches by applying both evolutionary and developmental biology approaches to well-studied groups of Anolis lizards in the Caribbean. Throughout much of the past seven years, in papers published in Nature and Science, Losos and other collaborators have shown remarkable results in population studies of Anolis lizards.