Thesis supervisor: László Orbán
Location of studies (in Hungarian): Keszthely Abbreviation of location of studies: KE
Description of the research topic:
Unlike the major land vertebrate clades, fishes show high level of diversity in regulation of their reproduction, including various combinations and lack of sex chromosomes, effect of several external factors on sex determination or early sex differentiation, natural and induced sex reversal, sex bias and various forms of hermaphroditism. Currently, our understanding of these processes and their potential connections is rather limited. The main reasons for this are the richness of various combinations among the >34 thousand species and the complexity of these processes that make their efficient study with classical approaches impossible.
In this project, the student will analyse the genetic regulatory mechanisms of fish reproduction and sex with the tools of functional genomics. According to our working hypothesis, the above processes are controlled by a similar, largely overlapping set of genes or genomic regions with some variations. Once this core set of loci/genes and their regulatory connections are revealed, fish reproduction will be easier to understand and possibly even control. Detailed analysis of these genes might yield useful information to improve our understanding of sex control and/or fertility in teleosts and possibly other vertebrates (see e.g. Saju et al., Cell Reports 25(12): 3252-3261.E4, 2018).
The target species for these studies are: zebrafish (model), common carp, European perch and European catfish. The data are expected to provide answers for the following major research questions:
1) What are the primary genetic regulators of sex in fishes?
2) Can we develop easy-to-use, minimally invasive molecular markers for early sexing of some of the above species?
3) How are sex reversal and sex bias regulated at the level of gene expression in cyprinid teleosts?
Although zebrafish has become a major model for various areas of biology over the past four decades, its reproduction is not very well understood. The former research team of the supervisor has contributed to the better understanding of processes regulating zebrafish sex over the past 19 years (for reviews see Orbán et al. Mol. Cell. Endocrinol. 312: 35-41, 2010; Liew and Orbán, Briefings in Functional Genomics 13(2): 172-187, 2014).
We will use the platforms and approaches developed for zebrafish research to study the sex determination and gonad differentiation processes in several fish species, including food fishes, using a comparative approach.
Required language skills: English Further requirements: MSc. in biology or a closely related discipline
Good command of English
Basic level of experience with genomics and possibly bioinformatics
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