Human Frontier Science Program Early Career Grant to study the water to land transition in euarthropods

March 17, 2022
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This week we received the fantastic news that the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) will support an international effort to understand the water to land transition in euarthropods, with emphasis on the evolution of respiratory systems! This highly collaborative research will be funded through the HFSP Early Career Award 2022 which is aimed at small teams of newly established principal investigators that have never worked together before, and in the pursue of high-risk high-reward projects. The Invertebrate Paleobiology and Evolution Lab in Harvard will join efforts with the Metazoa Phylogenomics Lab at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona led by Dr. Rosa Fernández, and the Laboratory for Multiscale Simulations for Chemistry & Materials Sciences led by Dr. Ana Belén Muñoz-García at the University of Naples Federico II. We will take a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to understand how euarthropods evolved the ability to breathe in a subaerial land environment from their ancestral aquatic environment at the chemical, genomic and macroevolutionary levels. At the same time, we will test whether the rise of atmospheric oxygen during the early Paleozoic may have facilitated, or even triggered, this major evolutionary event.

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