Jorge Torres Paz, Shaping Life 2, Online Conference, 7-9 April 2021

Shaping Life 2

→ Boarding Pass

Postdoc, Institut des Neurosciences Paris-Saclay

During the meeting I got interested by different presentations and afterwards I started to follow up some of the works in more detail. One of the presentations I enjoyed the most was the “two-part” talk by Andrea Pauli, which is somehow related to my work. In particular, in the first part she talked about the membrane protein Bouncer, which in fish is critical for fertilization and species-specific sperm recognition. She showed that it is possible to generate hybrid progeny from the two species by replacing the zebrafish gene by the ortholog in medaka, and vice versa. I found her results very interesting in different ways. First I think this could be a very useful model to study genome compatibility, stability and reorganization after an event of interspecific hybridization, since this mechanism has proven to be important for speciation during evolution. Second, and more related to my work, I think her findings could be a very interesting system to study the maternal effect (by comparing hybrids obtained using oocytes from zebrafish versus medaka) in different developmental processes such as zygotic genome activation and developmental timing.

→ Jorge presented a short talk entitled: “Gastruloids and chimeric embryo approaches to understand eye developmental defects in cavefish Astyanax mexicanus ”