Amemiya, Chris

My laboratory uses an interdisciplinary approach in order to better understand evolutionary and developmental aspects of the vertebrate immune system and of morphogenesis of body plans. We actively utilize comparative genomics approaches as well as functional biological experiments to draw inferences relevant to biological problems. In a nutshell, we seek to meld modern genomics approaches, evolutionary biology, population genetics theory and developmental biology into a coherent line of investigation. We use "deep branches" in vertebrate phylogeny (primarily very ancestral lineages of fishes) for our research. We are currently addressing two major lines of investigation. (1) What are the primordial mechanisms used to generate an immune response? How is the genome involved in creating and diversifying such a response? And (2) How have changes in genomic architecture and organization contributed to differences in body plans that we see amongst all metazoan species? What are the parallels between such evolutionary changes and disease manifestation?