Congratulations to Alexis Lanza who won Best Student Oral Presentation for the Division of Evolutionary and Developmental Biology at this year’s Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual conference! The title of Alexis’s talk was "Activin/Nodal signaling is required for establishing the dorsal-ventral axis in Capitella teleta”.
In her study, Alexis investigated a molecular signal in early stage embryos that functions to pattern the body, specifically to set up differences in the position of tissues along the dorsal-ventral or back to belly body axis of the marine segmented worm, Capitella teleta. To determine the identity of the signal, Alexis perturbed gene function using a technology recently developed for Capitella. This study was part of Alexis’s dissertation research, and she recently defended her PhD in the graduate program in the department of Biology.
The conference was held Jan 4 – 7th , 2020 in Austin, Texas.