In the Spotlight - Established Researcher.

Abstract

Igor Schneider is an Elected Affiliate Member of the Brazilian National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of a CAPES/Alexander von Humboldt fellowship.Igor is Guest Co-Editor of this special issue on regeneration. With whom and where did you study? I received my PhD degree in Genetics from the University of Iowa, trained by Prof. Dr. Diane Slusarski. My postdoctoral training was at the University of Chicago in the lab of Prof. Dr. Neil Shubin. What got you interested in Biology? When did you know EvoDevo was for you? My interest in biology stems from my upbringing. I was born in the city of Belem, nested within the Brazilian Amazon, and raised by evolutionary biologists; my parents were geneticists and their life work had been dedicated to establishing the phylogeny of new world monkeys. As a PhD student, I was influenced by exciting discoveries in the early 2000s linking developmental processes to morphological change, including work from David Kingsley's lab on pelvic spines of sticklebacks, Cliff Tabin's on beak shapes of Galapagos finches, and Neil Shubin's on Hox genes and the evolution of digits. I have since transitioned from Devo to EvoDevo and never looked back. Which achievement are you most proud of? Establishing a species as a research system is a familiar rite to many in the EvoDevo field. As a postdoc I studied vertebrate genomes, searching for genetic signatures linked to the transition from water to land. I felt then that I needed to study fish species more closely related to land vertebrates than the available research species. As I started my lab in Brazil, I set out to develop lab tools and techniques for research on the South American lungfish, the living sister group to land vertebrates. It took my team 2 years to obtain research and collection permits, and to actually find lungfish in the Marajo island, located a 12-hr-boat ride distance from Belem. A few more years to establish housing protocols, amass transcriptome data, in situ hybridization protocol, to test a plethora of antibodies for immunofluorescence, and so on. We still have a long way to go in establishing breeding protocols and obtaining a genome (lungfish have the largest genome among vertebrates!). Nevertheless, we have begun to publish our findings and thanks the South American lungfish, we now know that salamander-like limb regeneration is a trait inherited from fish ancestors. What are the biggest challenges for EvoDevo researchers in Latin America? The challenges are too many to list. Latin-Americans often and justly stress over how difficult it is to remain competitive while paying more and waiting longer for basic reagents than colleagues in North America and Europe: a set of primers may take 2–3 weeks to arrive, an antibody 60–90 days. In the Amazon, these obstacles compound with lack of basic infrastructure and frequent power outages in universities. However, such difficulties have been part of research in Latin America for decades and many scientists still find ways through creativity, optimism, and sheer perseverance to produce high quality research and training to their students. However, the recent trend of defunding science, particularly in Argentina and Brazil, has revealed itself a challenge too great to overcome. Unless this trend is reversed, we may see many Latin American EvoDevo labs closing and/or researchers moving abroad in the coming years. What do you see as the future of EvoDevo? What drew me to developmental biology in graduate school was the possibility to tinker with development in specific ways to understand how an adult body emerges from a single cell. As a postdoc in an EvoDevo lab I realized the importance of working with a range of lab species to study developmental processes in a comparative manner. Given the breadth of genomes available and molecular tools becoming routine and affordable, I believe that the EvoDevo field will continue to witness a great expansion of novel lab research species. I think this will be essential for EvoDevo; there's so much biodiversity to be explored. If I started anew, I would once again work on establishing a research species to answer questions of how development and the environment shape evolution.