James Malone PhD candidate at University of Oxford, UK.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your research interests?

I’m a first year PhD student from the Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP. I studied biology for my undergraduate degree, but I have always had a strong interest in the more theoretical approaches towards the subject. Currently, I am interested in how development, the map between genotype and phenotype, can alter evolutionary outcomes. For some traits, it seems as though the effect of development may even be stronger than natural selection. I want to better understand the precise evolutionary effects of development and how much explanatory power these effects have over broad phylogenetic scales.

What first interested you in this field of research?

I was always fascinated by the intricate order and organisation of living structures. I remember this dawning on me throughout secondary school, during dissections or just when looking at the structures of flowers or the veins in leaves. I wanted to understand better how these fascinating structures came to be, so that’s why I chose biology.

In school I read Erwin Schrodinger’s “What is Life?” as well as Dennis Noble’s “The Music of Life” which further stimulated my interest in biology. Noble’s discussion of reductionism in biology and the benefits and drawbacks of approaching the same subject at different scales was particularly eye-opening. Throughout my undergraduate degree, I found learning about mathematical models in biology, such as Turing patterns or the clock and wavefront model, particularly inspiring, not just because of their beauty, but also their predictive power and utility as a way of synthesising empirical knowledge. Together, this all drew me towards theoretical biology and evo-devo.

Can you briefly explain the research you presented at EED 2024?

I presented a project on the evolution of leaf shape in flowering plants. In 2012, a group of researchers (Geeta et al., 2012) found that, throughout the evolutionary history of flowering plants, simple leaf shapes seem to have evolved at a much faster rate from complex shapes than vice versa. Prof. Ard Louis, Dr. Nora Martin, Dr. Sam von der Dunk and I reproduced this result with newer data and tested whether this signal might be due to a developmental bias rather than selection. We did this by simulating mutation in a computational model of leaf development, without any selection for leaf shape. We found that mutation alone seems to be sufficient to produce the bias towards simple leaves that was observed in real plants back in 2012.

How will you continue to build on this research?

Throughout the rest of my PhD I hope to continue investigating the role of development in modulating evolutionary outcomes, however I would like to look at other traits. I am keen to learn more about animal development, specifically systems such as skin pigmentation patterns or segmentation during embryogenesis. I would like to also further develop my programming and mathematical skills by constructing my own models of development.