DATE2021.06.21 #Awards & Prizes

Associate Professor Naoki Irie, Department of Biological Sciences, received the Research Encouragement Award from the Evolutionary Studies Association of Japan

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

Associate Professor Naoki Irie

Associate Professor Naoki Irie of the Department of Biological Sciences has received the Research Encouragement Award from the Evolutionary Studies Association of Japan. The Encouragement Award is given to young members of the society who are expected to make significant progress in their research achievements in evolutionary studies and related fields. The research theme of the award was "Elucidation of general rules for ontogeny and phylogeny.

Associate Professor Irie has been addressing the long-standing question since the 19th century as to whether a general rule exists between ontogeny and phylogeny (evolution) in animals, and has published research results that experimentally support the "developmental hourglass model" which states that the intermediate stages of embryonic development in chordates are evolutionarily conserved.

Several theories on the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny, including Ernst Haeckel's iterative theory in 1866, have argued that the earlier stages of development are more ancestral, but this theory has been left out of modern biology as an idealistic argument that is not verifiable. By applying molecular developmental biology and large-scale information analysis techniques, Associate Professor Irie was able to overturn the classical prediction and present a series of experimental evidences that the "developmental hourglass model" is valid as a general rule. This achievement contributes to our understanding of the question of why animal body plans have remained robustly conserved across evolutionary scales of hundreds of millions of years. In addition, the results of this study provide a groundbreaking viewpoint and results that show that the use of different genes is a double-edged sword that can both promote and limit the diversification that is the hallmark of living organisms. We wish Associate Professor Irie continued success in his research.

The Evolutionary Studies Society of Japan 2021 Encouragement Award
http://sesj.kenkyuukai.jp/special/index.asp?id=35546


(Responsibility: Professor Hiroyuki Takeda, Department of Biological Sciences)