This week’s picture is this mural made by Cristina Rodríguez and Renata Cunha at the Transcriptomics of Development and Evolution Laboratory (TransDEvo Lab) of the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University (MELIS-UPF). Rodríguez is LabManager and Cunah is a PhD student at this lab, which has a dual affiliation with the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and is part of the joint CRG-UPF Program on Evolutionary Medical Genomics (EvoMG Program).
The mural represents the research areas of the laboratory, which studies DNA splicing; a mechanism that generates cellular diversity by allowing cells to generate proteins that are very similar, but not identical.
The different studies carried out analyse embryogenesis, cell diversity in evolution and various pathologies from the perspective of two major questions:
- How does a single genome sequence encode the information to build the enormous complexity of cell types and structures of an adult organism?
- How do changes in this sequence translate into morphological novelties during evolution?
The illustration therefore includes elements such as representations of the splicing process, embryogenesis or the brain tissue of mice, chickens and sharks. The lower part of the mural is dominated by a tree of life where all the people working in the laboratory are represented; each of them has been assigned an animal.
Vasilis Papadogiannis, a postdoc at the lab, has digitised the drawing and this version of the mural has become the header of the TransDEvo Lab website.
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