Genome topology and gene regulation in cephalopod neurons

The words such as smart and intelligence are heavily used today to describe attributes of a wide range of things, ranging from living organisms to refrigerators. Such use can arguably be related to either an overwhelming complexity of the observed system and/or the limitations of our current understanding. In modern biology, any organism with a brain larger than that of a snail and a faster reaction time has a high chance of enticing interests in its complexity and considered as smart or intelligent. Surprisingly, such intelligent systems are often very energy consuming and ineffective, making them relatively rare in the scope of all of animal biodiversity. In this context, cephalopod mollusks, such as octopus, squids, cuttlefish, have recently moved into focus enjoying strong popularity among the general public and scientists of various disciplines. Their large nervous systems, adaptive camouflage, and a wide range of fast behavioral responses make them the perfect system to study the evolution of such traits. The project Genome topology and gene regulation in cephalopod neurons addresses this question from the view of genome evolution. Building on the previous research conducted in our group, the projects will quantify how genomes of cephalopods have evolved their organization and function, specifically for the nervous system, in relation to their simple relatives. This research aims to test whether the observed evolutionary changes in the genomes can explain the increase in the nervous system size and its more complex organization. Importantly, we aim to test how often same or analogous genomic changes can happen across all animals, thus assessing the chances of other animal species becoming (involuntarily) intelligent.