Viviane Callier – Quanta Magazine

Mollusk Eyes Reveal How Future Evolution Depends on the Past

Viviane Callier — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 19:00:00 +0000

Biologists have often wondered what would happen if they could rewind the tape of life’s history and let evolution play out all over again. Would lineages of organisms evolve in radically different ways if given that opportunity? Or would they tend to evolve the same kinds of eyes, wings and other adaptive traits because their previous evolutionary histories had already sent them down certain...

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Cells Across the Body Talk to Each Other About Aging

Viviane Callier — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:08:44 +0000

Aging can seem like an unregulated process: As time marches along, our cells and bodies inevitably accumulate dings and dents that cause dysfunctions, failures and ultimately death. However, in 1993 a discovery upended that interpretation of events. Researchers found a mutation in a single gene that doubled a worm’s life span; subsequent work showed that related genes, all involved in the response...

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What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells

Viviane Callier — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 14:54:57 +0000

Just as people in different places seem to operate at different rhythms, so too do different species. They age at their own rates: Some, like the fruit fly, race to adulthood so they can reproduce before their ephemeral food source disappears, while creatures like humans mature slowly over decades, in part because building a large, complex brain requires it. And at the very beginning of an embryo’...

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How 3D Changes in the Genome Turned Sharks Into Skates

Viviane Callier — Tue, 30 May 2023 13:44:50 +0000

The marine creatures called skates skim along the sea bottom, rippling their winglike pectoral fins to propel themselves and to stir up small creatures hiding in the sand. Their unusual flattened body plan makes them one of the oddest families of fish in the sea, and it seems even odder that they evolved from streamlined, sharklike carnivores that swam about 285 million years ago.

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A Mutation Turned Ants Into Parasites in One Generation

Viviane Callier — Mon, 08 May 2023 14:49:21 +0000

When the researcher Daniel Kronauer was still a postdoc in 2008, he traveled to Okinawa, Japan, for wild specimens of clonal raider ants (the species Ooceraea biroi). In the first colony he collected, he noticed two ants with a strange appearance. They were small like workers, but they also sported small wing buds, which was striking because usually only ant queens develop wings.

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