Butterflies added a photoreceptor, and the brain was ready
Our paper in Science Advances (Gao et al., 2026) shows how butterflies added a second R7 photoreceptor to every unit of the eye, recreates the change in a "butterfly-fly," and finds that neurons that would normally die are retained to wire in the new input. Read the...
Love Spot preprint posted
Our preprint "Evolution and integration of a novel cell type in the housefly Love Spot" (Donati et al.) traces how R7 photoreceptors in this male-specific eye region are repurposed for target detection. Read it on bioRxiv.
Shivangi Malhotra completes her BS/MS thesis
Shivangi defended her thesis identifying candidate enhancers for regionalized gene expression in the Aedes retina. Congratulations, Shivangi!
Cell fate ratios are encoded by transcriptional dynamics
Current Biology publishes Ainsworth and Zhao et al., showing that the dynamics of spineless transcription set the ratio of R7 photoreceptor subtypes in the Drosophila retina. Co-first authors Julia Ainsworth and Tim Zhao are PhD students in the lab. Read the paper.
The insect eye ground plan is deeply conserved
PNAS publishes Gao et al., "Deep conservation complemented by novelty and innovation in the insect eye ground plan." Read the paper.
NIH EDGE award begins
An NIH NHGRI award through the EDGE program (R01HG013634) begins, supporting the lab's comparative retina work.