Lab meeting on thermal adaptation in wall lizard embryos

How do wall lizard embryos adapt to cold climate?

Wall lizards (Podarcis muralis) from Italy and France have recently been introduced to the UK, where embryos have to cope with drastically colder soil temperatures compared to their native range. Incubation experiments have demonstrated that lizards introduced from France and Italy have evolved faster developmental rate at low temperatures compared to their native counterparts. Last field season, we tackled the question of the underlying mechanism by doing a RNA-Seq experiment on native and introduced wall lizard embryos. 

On Tuesday I will take the opportunity and tell you what we found out about the wallies in particular, and about the evolution of gene expression patterns in general.

Also, the lizard room is ready now and whoever is interested can get a little guided tour after the meeting.

And there will be fika, of course.