Eric
S.
Haag
Assistant
Professor
Telephone: (301)
405-8534
Office: Biology/Psychology
Room 0256
Lab: Biology/Psychology Room
0245
Email: ehaag@umd.edu
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C.
briggsae
hermaphrodite (above) and male (left)
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Education
B.
A. (music and biology),
Oberlin
College, 1990
Ph.D., Indiana University,
Bloomington 1997 (Rudolf
Raff, thesis advisor)
postdoctoral fellow, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
(Judith Kimble,
advisor)
Research Interests
My laboratory
studies the developmental genetics of evolutionary change in
animals.
Of particular interest to me are reproductive adaptations whose
evolution required major developmental novelties. Currently the
lab is focused on the evolution of self-fertile hermaphroditism in
nematodes.
We use the model nematode Caenorhabditis
elegans as a starting point, which confers several
advantages.
First, sister species of C. elegans have different reproductive
modes that are based on differences in sex determination in a single
tissue--the germ line. Second,
C. elegans sex determination has been subjected to intense genetic,
molecular, and biochemical investigation, which provides a wealth of
potential
mechanisms for investigation. Third, many of the tools
available to C. elegans researchers are applicable to its
relatives
as well, such as classical genetics, RNA interference-mediated reverse
genetics, and even complete genome sequence.
We seek to identify
the molecular and genetic mechanisms that distinguish the sex
determination
of androdioecious (hermaphrodite/male) species from that of
gonochoristic
(male/female) species of worms. We also are interested in the
convergent evolution of selfing, the
evolutionary
forces that drive the rapid evolution of sex determination even in the
absence of overt phenotypic change, and the molecular and genomic
responses
to these forces.
Work
in the lab includes
the following
projects:
- classical
and reverse genetic analysis of sex determination in other Caenorhabditis
species, especially C. briggsae
- population-level
molecular evolution studies of rapidly diverging sex determination
genes
- basic
and comparative characterization of key proteins of the nematode sex
determination
pathway
- genome-level consequences of mating system evolution
in Caenorhabditis
species
- empirical and theoretical aspects of compensatory
evolution in the evolution of development
Feel free to
contact Eric if you are
interested in participating in this work. Our lab
(a.k.a. The Palace of Worm Sex) is on the ground floor of the Biology/Psychology
Building.
At left, a
self-fertile XX C. briggsae
fem-3(nm63) deletion
mutant. This
phenotype (or
lack therof) differs
from the
self-sterility seen in the
equivalent C. elegans fem-3
mutant.
Recent Publications:
Haag,
E.S. and True, J.R.
(2001).
From mutants to
mechanisms? Assessing the candidate gene paradigm in evolutionary
biology. Evolution 55: 1077-1084. PDF
True,
J.R. and Haag, E.S.
(2001).
Developmental
system drift and flexibility in evolutionary trajectories. Evol.
Dev. 3: 109-119. PDF
Haag,
E.S. (2001).
Rolling back to
BOULE. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 98: 6983-6985. PDF
Haigis,
M.C., Haag, E.S., and
Raines,
R.T. (2002) Evolution of ribonuclease inhibitor by exon
duplication. Mol. Biol. Evol. 19: 959-963. PDF
Haag,
E.S., Wang, S., and
Kimble, J.
(2002). Rapid coevolution of the nematode sex-determining genes fem-3
and tra-2. Curr. Biol. 12:
2035-2041. PDF
Haag,
E.S. (2003) The
microevolution of development (meeting review). Evol & Dev. 5: 1-2. PDF
Haag,
E.S. and Doty, A.V.
(2005). Sex determination across evolution: connecting the
dots (“Primer”). PLoS Biology
3: e21-24. PDF
Haag, E.S. and Ackerman, A.D. (2005) Intraspecific variation in fem-3 and tra-2, two rapidly coevolving
nematode
sex-determining genes. Gene
349: 35-42. PDF
Haag, E.S. and Molla,
M.N. (2005) Compensatory
evolution of interacting gene products through multifunctional
intermediates. Evolution 59:
1620-32 PDF
Dowload
Synth_Pop code
Haag, E.S. (2005).
The evolution of nematode sex
determination: C. elegans as
a reference point for comparative biology. In Wormbook:
Online review of C. elegans biology, ed. The C. elegans Research
Community. PDF
Haag, E.S. and Pilgrim,
D. (2005). Harnessing Caenorhabditis
genomics for
evolutionary developmental biology. Curr. Genomics 6: 579-88.
Hill, R.C., Carvalho,
C., Salogiannis, J., Schlager, B.,
Pilgrim, D., and Haag, E.S. (2006). Genetic flexibility in the
convergent evolution of hermaphroditism in Caenorhabditis nematodes. Dev. Cell 10: 531-38 PDF Suppl. Mats.
Haag, E.S. (2007)
Compensatory vs. pseudocompensatory
evolution in molecular and developmental interactions. Genetica
129: 45-55. PDF
Haag, E.S.,
Chamberlin, H., Coghlan, A., Fitch, D.H.A., Peters, A.D.,
and Schulenburg, H. (2007) Caenorhabditis evolution: if they all look alike, you
aren't
looking hard enough. Trends
Genet. 23: 101-04. PDF
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