Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society

Three-spined stickleback fish live in both salt and fresh water. When the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age, new lakes were formed, and sticklebacks from the sea found new habitats in those freshwater environments. At the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory on the research campus of the Max Planck Society in Tuebingen, Germany, Felicity Jones and her team are studying how the genome of fish changes as they adapt. 12,000-year-old stickleback bones provide insight into the early phase of this transformation.

Understanding why individuals differ from each other is a major goal in evolutionary biology. We study the genome of fruit flies to uncover which and how many genes regulate phenotypic variation, and integrate environmental perturbations to answer a key but still unresolved question: does the function of a given gene depend on the environment? Using whole-genome sequencing of thousands of individual fruit flies we identify the genes that regulate lifespan in low and high sugar diets and ask: are the genes that determine how long an individual lives the same ones in both diets?

In order to generate haploid gametes, eukaryotes can undergo a specialised form of cell division called meiosis. During the first round of meiosis, homologous chromosomes - one from each parent) - must be linked together so they can be properly segregated. In order to do so, most organisms use meiotic recombination to generate crossovers between homologous chromosomes. We describe our recent work that has used biochemical reconstitution to understand parts of the protein machinery that ensures faithful segregation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis.

Genome sequencing holds the key to fighting disease and understanding biodiversity. However, current techniques only produce sequence fragments and omit its context, sometimes causing misleading results. We have developed haplotagging, an improved method for highly accurate sequencing at low costs while preserving the sequences context. Haplotagging can be applied to identify a single gene present in two different butterfly species living between the Amazon and the Andes which creates a unique wing pattern.

We use an interdisciplinary approach combining computational chemistry, biophysics, and developmental biology to create new signaling activators and inhibitors. We have designed novel hematopoietic growth factors and antagonists of cancer-relevant signals, and their structures are in atomic-level agreement with our theoretical predictions. Strikingly, the growth factors are highly active and can induce the differentiation of blood cells in living zebrafish embryos. This strategy holds great promise to engineer signaling molecules with novel functionalities for future clinical applications.

Genetic variation is the basis of biodiversity, and is the key substrate of evolution. We are studying meiotic recombination, a key source of genetic variation, to elucidate on the role it plays while organisms adapt to new environments. Using linked-read genome sequencing technology, we have developed a method of studying recombination in individuals, and are using this to identify its molecular basis. Research on this fundamental process has implications for our understanding of first trimester abortion, genome function and how molecular mechanisms shape evolution in natural populations.