Hej! My name is Alfredo Rago and I am an Italian post-doc. I have just joined the Uller lab after finishing my PhD on the regulatory basis of sexual dimorphism at the University of Birmingham (UK). So far I’ve used wasps (Nasonia vitripennis) and water fleas (Daphnia magna), which lack sex-chromosomes, to investigate how phenotypic differences are induced in genetically identical individuals. The project involved the analysis of developmental gene expression time-series data of both sexes via network reconstruction.
My research focuses on expanding our understanding on how regulatory networks evolve by integrating genomic, transcriptomic, developmental and environmental factors. This generally means reconstructing large heterogeneous regulatory networks from experimental data and analysing how their structure changes under specific circumstances to find which elements are most likely to be subject to change and whether these changes have a biased potential towards adaptiveness.
My current project is to develop a novel framework for the understanding of plasticity by using simulations to model environmental effects as intrinsic component of developmental regulatory networks. The project will involve a collaboration with the Watson Lab in the University of Southampton. My intent is to explore how developmental systems evolve by integrating environmental and genetic information, potentially devising methods to predict and identify the architecture of plastic traits.
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