Shedding light upon evolution, a University of Houston professor studying cell lineages now finds surprising simplicity in the logic of animal development.
Ricardo Azevedo, an assistant professor in the department of biology and biochemistry, specializes in how evolution changes the way animals develop. His recent findings using computational biology to reveal the surprisingly simple patterns of cell division in the embryos of small invertebrates is described in a paper titled "The Simplicity of Metazoan Cell Lineages," appearing in the current issue of Nature, the weekly scientific journal for biological and physical sciences research.