At the moment I have no special interest. Instead I'd like to pick up everything that's new for me and perhaps some special interest will evolve during the course. I have a good background in developmental and evolutionary biology and formal training and experience in methods of molecular biology and developmental biology. In my graduate work I isolated and characterized a set of novel embryonic genes from Drosophila melanogaster, which are not conserved in evolution. To do this is interesting, because in genome projects a large proportion of newly discovered genes has no similarity to genes or proteins which are already in the databases.
Nothing is known about their function or evolutionary relationship to other genes.
Furthermore, it is known that evolutionary rates of proteins can vary by orders of magnitude. Rapidly evolving proteins, which do not have a conserved domain, may diverge rapidly even between moderately related species and have no simililarity on sequence level. To determine the degree of evolutionary conservation of randomly isolated cDNA clones, I did hybridiziation experiments with zooblots. I also completely sequenced a number of cDNAs which are not conserved and have an interesting expression pattern in the Drosophila embryo. I also isolated the homologs from a closely related speces, D. yakuba, and currently sequence them as well.