Castillo-Davis Lab
Welcome to the Castillo-Davis Lab! The wonderful diversity of animals, plants, and fungi on Earth has come about by an interplay of natural selection, historical contingency and the structure of development. However, the mechanistic details of this billion year long organic play are still not understood. In particular, it is not fully understood why some features (characters) of organisms are preserved for millennia while others change rapidly.
Our goal is to understand how the process of development, natural selection and historical contingency work together to shape phenotypic evolution. What are the primary evolutionary forces that act on an organism's characters? What features of the genome and development facilitate phenotypic change- or impede it?
To answer these questions, we combine statistical and experimental genomic methods to analyze the evolution of proteins, cis-regulatory sequences and more recently, gene networks. The comparative method of evolutionary biology, from the genome- to organism-scale, figures prominently in our work. While our lab is computationally genome-agnostic, almost all of our experimental and molecular work is done within the genus Drosophila.
Current Projects
- Modeling cis-regulatory sequence logic & evolution
- Gene network evolution within the genus Drosophila (phototransduction)
- High-throughput phenotyping & fast-mapping of QTL using tiling microarrays
- Development of theory and tests regarding homology and character stasis
- Species delimitation in the fossil record using intra- and inter-species variation
- Software development for genomic/proteomic analysis (GeneMerge)