April 16 @ 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Seminar held in person only.
Dr. Robert E. Steel
Professor Emeritus, Department of Biological Chemistry
School of Medicine, University of California Irvine
“Vernal Pools, Blackwater Swamps, and Hydra Genomes”
The freshwater cnidarian Hydra has been the object of study at UCI since the campus opened in 1965. Research in the labs of UCI faculty members Dick Campbell, Howard Lenhoff, Robert Josephson, and Hans Bode explored a variety of aspects of Hydra biology. When I joined the faculty in 1986, my lab and the Bode lab began using molecular approaches to investigate the developmental biology of Hydra. We cloned the first genes from Hydra, and in 2010 we published the first Hydra genome sequence. Recently, we have begun exploring the evolutionary history and biogeography of Hydra using genomic approaches. This has led to some intriguing findings with regard to the geographic distribution of Hydra and its reproductive biology.