Biography:

Dr. Beldades work focuses on the colour patterns of the wings of Bicyclus anynana butterflies to address key issues of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Butterfly wing patterns are ideally suited to study the reciprocal interactions between evolutionary and developmental processes (evo-devo) that shape morphological variation (pub#3). They are visually compelling products of selection, often with a clear adaptive value, and are also amenable to a detailed developmental characterization at different levels, including a new generation of genomic tools (pub#10). She is also interested in the Evolutionary Genetics and Genomics analysis in non-model systems. The need to diversify study organisms has been repeatedly acknowledged and the generalization of genomic resources outside classical model systems is making it possible..

Abstract:

Evolution and Development and those endless forms most beautiful

Like Darwin, biologists and laymen alike have long been captivated by the amazing diversity of shapes and colours in living organisms. This diversity is the product of two fundamental biological processes: development, a process of organismal change that happens in each generation, and evolution, a process of populational change that happens across generations. Development translates the information in DNA to produce a more or less complex multicellular organism from a fertilized egg. Variation in DNA sequence can result in differences in developmental programs and variation in adult organisms. The phenotypic variation thus produced is a universal property of living organisms and is the raw material of evolution by natural selection, the processes that Darwin identified and described. Despite the obvious interactions between evolution and development, the disciplines studying them grew largely separated for a great part of the 20th century, until the realization that organisms so distinct as flies and mice share key genes responsible for embryonic development. This realization catalized the growth of the field of evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo which is attempting to explain how those endless forms most beautiful are being evolved as referred to by Darwin in his Origin of the Species. My work in this area uses colour patterns on butterfly wings to dissect the genetic and developmental basis of morphological diversification.