BBE Division Seminar - Justin Crocker

"Exploring biological design space: from perturbations to phenotypes"

Living organisms occupy only a small and structured subset of the phenotypic states that are developmentally and physiologically accessible. We explore this broader biological design space to identify the rules that govern how organisms are built, how they respond to their environments, and how they evolve. Our approach combines large-scale perturbation experiments, automated whole-organism phenotyping, and machine-learning methods to measure and model phenotypic variation directly in living animals.

Using Drosophila and mosquitoes, we quantify how thousands of environmental perturbations reshape behavior, development, and physiology. These experiments reveal pervasive sublethal effects, trait-specific sensitivities, and organismal responses that would be missed by conventional survival-based assays. We are now extending the same logic to genetic variation with TF-HighEvo, a platform for generating targeted mutations across native regulatory networks and measuring their consequences in vivo.

By connecting molecular, developmental, neural, and behavioral measurements across perturbation landscapes, we aim to identify the principles that link genotype and environment to phenotype. The longer-term goal is to build predictive maps of organismal possibility—and eventually use them to design biological outcomes within the constraints of development and evolution that are relevant to our changing world.

Host: Marianne Bronner