Research achievements during my undergraduate studies

Research achievements during my undergraduate studies.

Background. The early 2000s were characterized by an explosion in the number of genomes sequenced for different species. With the preliminary annotation of the vertebrates’ genomes, the clustered protocadherins emerged as the strongest candidates to provide single cell identity to neurons. I decided to look at their evolution to gain insights about their function. 

Research. I showed how the protocadherin gene clusters evolved in human and mouse after the divergence of the species (Morgan, 2008). In particular, I found that a unique unit of evolution explains all the recent duplication events for all the protocadherin clusters (Figure 1).
Perspective. The unit of evolution turned out to encode for the C-terminal region of a protocadherin together with the promoter region and the N-terminal region of the protocadherin immediately downstream in the cluster. Whether this form of evolution has functional implication is not known. 

Figure 1. Evolution of part of the human b-protocadherin cluster. Each block represents a gene. The light colored part of the gene encodes for the C-terminal portion of the protein.

Morgan, M. Models for the recent evolution of protocadherin gene clusters. Biocell 32, 9–26 (2008).