Event:

Sharks are direct descendants of an ancient lineage of vertebrates whose common ancestor with us lived around 450 million years ago, coinciding with the emergence of jaws and predatory behaviour in vertebrates. This intriguing transition in vertebrate history was likely accompanied by a rapid complexification of their brains. Modern cartilaginous fish offer us a unique window to reconstruct early vertebrate brains, identify developmental variations that led to brain complexification, and understand how developmental programs were subsequently modified across different vertebrate lineages. In my talk, I will show how our single-cell and spatial transcriptomic study in the embryonic shark brain: 1) is helping us reconstruct the developmental programs at the core of all vertebrate telencephalons; 2) revealed the presence of homologous cell types with important roles in the mammalian neocortex, whose presence in sharks is highly intriguing and carries significant evolutionary implications. I will touch on our CRISPR efforts in the shark embryo and explain why it is a fantastic model to answer deep fundamental questions about how vertebrate brains evolved