Although the importance of the brain in almost all our daily activities such as reading thinking and loving, how and when it originated remains an open question.
My research to understand the evolutionary origin of the brain and to achieve this, and we used one of the far related cousins the purple sea urchin to understand how neurons are formed starting from fertilized eggs.
While it is estimated based that humans and the sea urchin shared a parent that existed ~ 540 million years ago, a sea urchin has less than 100 neurons most these two species shared a large amount of the genes used for neurogenesys.
If you are interested in discussing this fascinating project with Dr. Roberto Feuda, or perhaps have ideas where synergies might exist in our work I would love to discuss further.
