The University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series continues Thursday, October 1, 2026, at 6 p.m. with the program titled “Named for the Sunshine State: How a Florida Marine Creature Holds the Secret to Vertebrate Origins”. Dr. Jr-Kai Sky Yu, Research Fellow and Chief of Yilan Marine Research Station, Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, will be the speaker.
This free lecture will be presented in person at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine. Those interested also have the option of registering to watch via Zoom live the night of the lecture.
Register to watch online: https://ufl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eeP3ilpkT9S-xbM4CteqYg
Over 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian explosion, the world’s oceans witnessed an extraordinary surge of animal diversity that laid the foundation for all modern animal groups. Yet, because soft-bodied animals rarely leave fossils behind, our understanding of how different animal groups evolved and diverged remains fragmented.
Today, new technologies like whole-genome sequencing and molecular developmental biology are offering new insights into this question. By comparing the genomic structure and embryonic development of living species, scientists have identified remarkably conserved genetic toolkits among distantly related animals, as well as the possible genetic modifications underlying the diversification of body plans.
In this talk, the speaker will discuss how comparing genomes and developmental mechanisms across species allows us to look back into evolutionary time. Drawing from his own research, the speaker will highlight a local marine invertebrate, the Florida amphioxus, that occupies a key position on the tree of life. By investigating the critical evolutionary transition between invertebrates and vertebrates, researchers are reconstructing the genetic blueprint of our ancient ancestors to answer a fundamental question: how did vertebrates first originate? Beyond the laboratory, the speaker will also take you behind the scenes of a researcher’s life, sharing firsthand stories of field expeditions across continents and the exciting dynamics of international research collaborations.
Dr. Jr-Kai Sky Yu is a Research Fellow and Chief of the Yilan Marine Research Station at the Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology (ICOB), Academia Sinica, Taiwan. His research focuses on the evolution of developmental mechanisms, with a particular emphasis on understanding the origins of chordate and vertebrate novel characters. His research group primarily uses cephalochordates (amphioxus) as a model system, integrating comparative genomics and molecular developmental approaches to investigate the key changes during the invertebrate-to-vertebrate transition.
Born and raised in Taiwan, Dr. Yu received his Bachelor’s degree in Zoology and Master’s degree in Marine Biology from National Taiwan University. In 1999, he moved to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, for his Ph.D. training, followed by postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology. During this period, he began using the Florida amphioxus (Branchiostoma floridae) as his primary research model and participated in the first amphioxus genome sequencing project. In 2007, he returned to Taiwan to establish his research laboratory at ICOB, Academia Sinica, and has served as Chief of the Yilan Marine Research Station since 2018. Over the past decade, Dr. Yu collaborated extensively with international research groups on macroevolutionary genomic and transcriptomic studies across various amphioxus species. These studies have provided crucial insights into the structural changes and regulatory modifications that occurred during early vertebrate evolution.