Aleksandra Marconi

I am a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Morphological Evolution Group (Santos Lab) at the Zoology Department of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, where try to understand of the evolution of animal development with cichlid fishes. 🌍 🐠

In my post-doctoral research, I'm interested in exploring the developmental mechanisms involved in morphological divergence of brain structures in the context of ecological speciation in East African cichlid fishes.

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Research

I'm interested in evolutionary and developmental biology. Much of my research is about exploring how changes at the level of the genome, gene regulatory networks and developmental mechanisms during embryogenesis can affect morphological evolution of the neural crest-derived features and generate natural phenotypic diversity. Representative papers are highlighted.

Our results demonstrate that A. calliptera egg-spot development is an exciting model for investigating pigment pattern formation at the cellular level in a system with developmental plasticity, sexual dimorphism, and intraspecific variation.

We identify expression and functional divergence between teleost-specific sox10 gene duplications and report a novel function of sox10-like in craniofacial skeletogenesis in Malawi cichlids.

My PhD thesis!

This work details the early development of three divergent Lake Malawi cichlids. A comparative analysis reveals anatomical and timing differences during embryogenesis and indicates divergence of species' morphologies before their overt formation.

We identify a population of cycling Sox5/6/9+ perichondral progenitor cells that generate new cartilage during adult skate growth, and we show that persistence of chondrogenesis in adult skates correlates with ability to spontaneously repair cartilage injuries.

Panagrolaimid nematodes have colonized environments ranging from arid deserts to Arctic and Antarctic biomes. To identify systems that may contribute to these striking abilities, we sequenced and compared the genomes and transcriptomes of parthenogenetic and outcrossing panagrolaimid species, including cryptobionts and non-cryptobionts.

To better understand transcriptional regulatory mechanism driving heart development and the consequences of its disruption in vivo, we performed time-series analyses of the transcriptome and genome-wide chromatin accessibility in isolated cardiomyocytes (CMs) from zebrafish embryos at developmental stages corresponding to heart tube morphogenesis, looping, and maturation.

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website.