July 17, 2018
Andrew Aman, a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Parichy lab, is the lead author on a study sheduled to be published today in eLife. Andrew's team "used molecular tools to manipulate and visualize scale development in zebrafish and tease out the details of how it works". On the molecular level, the mechanisms of scale development in fish are very similiar to those found in the development of feathers in birds and fur and hair in mammals. According to the article, "It turns out, as the researchers suspected, skin appendages seen today originated hundreds of millions of years ago in primitive vertebrate ancestors, prior to the origin of limbs, jaws, teeth or even the internal skeleton." To read the full article in UVA Today, please click here.