Event Date
Kyle DeMarr, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Scholar, Mullins Lab, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine
Dr. DeMarr presents: "Cytoskeletal Templating of Cuticle Secretion in Butterfly Scale Evolution"
About the seminar: Butterfly and moth wing patterns are mosaics composed of hundreds of thousands of scales. Each secreted by a single cell in the chrysalis, these scales are large, architecturally complex husks with nanometer-precise morphologies conferring functional advantages to the insect in the realms of coloration, thermoregulation, and aerodynamics. This link between form and function presents an opportunity to merge developmental and evolutionary biology to understand motifs of biological organization at the level of single cells. To build a comparative framework of these structures, and to more comprehensively sample their evolutionary breadth, dynamically visualizing cellular organization across many species is essential. To this end, I have leveraged live cell dyes with an assortment of novel manipulations and high-resolution microscopy to directly observe movements of nuclei, cytoskeletal proteins, and other cellular components in living, developing wings. As a demonstration of the strength of this approach, I provide a framework for causally determining how organization of actin filaments and microtubules coordinates growth between and within species’ different scale types, specifically in the evolution of camouflage, pheromone dispersal, and iridescence. I then identify possible cytoskeletal partners that contribute to secreting the cuticle itself before introducing an approach taking advantage of naturally occurring variation in structural color between species we are using to more finely understand regulation of the exoskeleton more generally.
About the speaker: Kyle DeMarr is a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco working with R. Dyche Mullins. He completed a PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley (Thesis Advisor: Nipam Patel) and an Entomology BS from Cornell University.
Host: Arthur Charles-Orszag ([email protected])