[MUSIC] I'm Dr. Karen Sears.

I'm a faculty member at

the University of Illinois. Within the University of Illinois, I'm affiliated with
several
different departments and programs. My primary home is within
the School of Integrated Biology. And I also am a faculty member
within the Regenerative Biology & Tissue Engineering theme of
the Institute for Genomic Biology. In my lab, we study the form of the limb. And we
really want to understand
what happens at the molecular, the developmental level to yield limbs
that look very different from one another? We primarily focus on mammals. But we
focus on mammals for
a lot of reasons. One, the first one, the most
obvious one is that we're mammals. We want to understand a little bit
about our evolutionary history. If you think about a human's
limbs relative to, let's say, the limb of a dog, limb of a cat,
the limb of most mammals, we actually are pretty unique in that
we stand upright We have long legs. We have hands and arms that are capable
of a lot of freedom of movement. So humans are actually
an interesting case study. The radiation of limbs and
the specialization of limbs for different functions. By functions, I mean, ways
that the animal
gets around in its environment. Ways in which the animal would use
the limbs to get food, let's say. That specialization of the limbs has
been very important in the radiation of mammals and has really allowed them
to be as successful as they have been. There are organisms such as horses,
mammals such as horses. Horses have only one hoof, right? They only have one toe
essentially as we have five toes. There are also organisms such as bats. And bats
have very big forelimbs
that they've turned into wings. And to do this they elongate
the fingers a lot to achieve this form. And so if you look at a bat skeleton. What
you see here, this is a bat skeleton. And within the bat, here's the head up here,
here's the body,
kind of the torso of the bat. Here's it's hind legs and these gigantic things are
it's forelimbs,
would be its arms. And what bats do is they make all
the bones in their arms a lot bigger than ours, a lot longer actually. And so, this
bone right here is
the same as our bone right here. This part of my arm, this forearm. And then what
these long bones are,
are actually they're fingers. And so the bats fingers are almost
as long as its entire body. So if we looked like a bat it would be
the same as if our fingers were as long or as tall as we are. And so we share with
bats and with all
other mammals the same bones in our limbs. We all have the same bones. It's just
the way that those bones look is different among different
mammalian organisms. That specialization of the limbs has
been very important in the radiation of mammals. So when we look amongst the world
today,
we see that mammals have occupied or been able to invade a large number of
what we would call ecological niches. Or another way to say this is that mammals
have been able to move into new habitats, new places, and do different things. So
everything from a bat,
which flies at night, through things such as whales and
dolphins, which swim in the oceans. Horses, which are able to run
very quickly across the plains. And also organisms such as this tiger
shown here, that are able to climb. So changes in the form of the limbs have
enabled mammals to do all
of these different behaviors. What we are interested in is how
the process of development has changed to yield these different limb forms
among mammalian organisms. And one of the things we notice right
away from just looking at the limb is that the parts of the limb, these three
parts, are conserved across mammals. All mammals have those and it's just a change
in the relative
proportions of those aspects in, let's say, the numbers of fingers,
that's what distinguishes mammals. So what we want to understand is,
how has development changed? How has this process of an organism going
from a fertilized egg to an adult, how has that process changed to yield these
different shapes that are so important to mammals and to have been so important
to mammalian revolutionary history? One of the big findings that's emerging
from our research in our lab is that we're seeing that the same genes are turned
on in the limbs of all mammals. So the same genes. Genes like Sonic Hedgehog,
genes like FGF8, BMPs, they're very important
in making a limb in us. They're very important in
making a limb in an opossum. And what's changing amongst organisms
is not the genes themselves. Same genes are there but the level
at which those genes are present or the products of those genes are present,
the proteins of those genes, those differ a lot among organisms. The timing of when
the genes
are turned on and turned off. When those proteins of
that gene are present, that differs a lot among organisms. So it's not changes in
what genes are there, it's changes in when those
genes are turned on, turned off, how much gene product they
make, how little gene product they make. Where, specifically within the limb, those
gene products are present
that are yielding these relatively subtle changes in the form of
a conserved anatomical structure. [MUSIC]