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Dr. sc. Tomislav Domazet-Lošo, project leader of the UKF project "Phylostratigraphic analysis of disease genes expression in the context of life cycle", published a scientific article in the jurnal Nature
As the result of a joint UKF project between Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb (Croatia) and Max Planck Institute for the Evolutionary Biology in Plön (Germany), evolutionary biologists Tomislav Domazet-Lošo and Diethard Tautz have published in the latest issue of Nature a cover story that shed light on thetwo-centuries old phylogeny-ontogeny controversy. Using a molecular quantitative approach the evolutionary geneticists uncovered for the first time a clear pattern of correlations between ontogeny and phylogeny. To achieve this, they first devised a new measure (Transcriptome Age Index - TAI) that integrates phylogenetic age and the expression levels of all genes at the respective developmental stage. After they applied TAI on a fine grained series of expression patterns across ontogeny of zebrafish (Danio rerio) they found support for the hourglass model of development and the existence of the phylotypic stage, a most disputed.
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