We study the genetic innovation that shapes how animal germline genomes are regulated. Such innovation is often driven by internal conflicts within animal genomes and by studying these processes we aim to uncover:
YOLO but germ cells are immortal and we want to know how they do that.
To better understand this, we study the molecular mechanisms of gene and genome regulation in animal germline cells. Counterintuitively, the essential processes that goven germ cell regulation are not well conserved – often they are even rapidly evolving, suggesting involvement in evolutionary arms races.
Despite its often harmonic appearance, all life forms exist in a constant evolutionary arms race. This arms race is caused by pervasive evolutionary and genetic conflicts. Such conflicts take place between species of prey, predators, parasites and their hosts. But conflicts are also present within species where selfish genetic elements such as transposons have often opposing evolutionary ‘interests’ to the host genome. An arms race is a state of rapid innovation and in biology innovation takes place by changes in the function of genes or by the emergence of entirely new genes. Evolutionary arms races are therefore rich sources of genetic innovation. We study the genetic innovation of germ cell regulation to better understand how germ cells are able to stay immortal and carry the genome across generations at evolutionary time scales.
