Wikipedia

Prashant P. Sharma

Prashant P. Sharma is an Indian-American invertebrate biologist and a professor of Integrative Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[1]

Prashant P. Sharma
Born (1984-03-15) March 15, 1984 (age 40)
Alma materHarvard University

Education edit

Sharma attended Harvard University and completed his undergraduate training in 2006. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2012. He was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History.

Career edit

Sharma joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. His research group works on phylogenomics, evolutionary developmental biology, and comparative genomics of ancient invertebrate groups, with emphasis on chelicerate arthropods. He is the director of the Zoological Museum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received a distinguished Class of 1955 Teaching Excellence Award.[2][3]

His early work focused on the systematics and biogeography of the armored harvestmen (Laniatores) from the South Pacific. In 2011, he described three new families of harvestmen from the Paleotropics and showed that one family of armored harvestmen is capable of extreme dispersal, in contrast to the rest of this arachnid order.[4] His research group later discovered a suborder of fossil daddy-long-legs with four eyes called Tetraophthalmi, whereas all living species only have two eyes.[5][6]

His group is best known for using genome duplications to understand the relationships of arachnids. He proposed a grouping of arachnids with book lungs as well as pseudoscorpions, which is called "Arachnopulmonata" and is united by a shared whole genome duplication.[7][8][9][10] He proposed that horseshoe crabs are part of Arachnida and that arachnids independently colonized land more than once,[11] using both genomes and fossils.[8][10]

His laboratory works on the genetics and development of daddy-long-legs (Opiliones or "harvestmen") and spiders. He previously showed that spiders recycled leg-patterning genes to make the segments of their heads, an example of an evolutionary process called cooption.[12][13] His team later showed that a gene duplicate restricted to Arachnopulmonata is responsible for making all eye types of spiders.[14] In 2021, his group sequenced the first Opiliones genome and created "daddy-short-legs" using gene silencing to understand how daddy-long-legs make their long legs.[15][16]

References edit

  1. ^ "New professor turns to arachnids to solve evolutionary puzzles | College of Letters & Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison". ls.wisc.edu. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  2. ^ Auger, Ian (2023-01-30). "UW awards Distinguished Teaching Awards to twelve faculty". The Badger Herald. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  3. ^ "Meet the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award recipients". news.wisc.edu. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  4. ^ "Arachnids crossed the Pacific". Nature. 485 (7400): 550. May 2012. doi:10.1038/485550a. ISSN 0028-0836.
  5. ^ Blaszczak-Boxe,LiveScience, Agata. "Four-Eyed 'Daddy Longlegs' Fossil Discovered". Scientific American. Retrieved 2023-05-10.
  6. ^ "Daddy longlegs once had four eyes, research says". PBS NewsHour. 2014-04-11. Retrieved 2023-05-10.
  7. ^ Sharma, Prashant P.; Kaluziak, Stefan T.; Pérez-Porro, Alicia R.; González, Vanessa L.; Hormiga, Gustavo; Wheeler, Ward C.; Giribet, Gonzalo (November 2014). "Phylogenomic Interrogation of Arachnida Reveals Systemic Conflicts in Phylogenetic Signal". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 31 (11): 2963–2984. doi:10.1093/molbev/msu235. ISSN 1537-1719.
  8. ^ a b Ballesteros, Jesús A; Sharma, Prashant P (2019-11-01). Halanych, Ken (ed.). "A Critical Appraisal of the Placement of Xiphosura (Chelicerata) with Account of Known Sources of Phylogenetic Error". Systematic Biology. 68 (6): 896–917. doi:10.1093/sysbio/syz011. ISSN 1063-5157.
  9. ^ Ontano, Andrew Z; Gainett, Guilherme; Aharon, Shlomi; Ballesteros, Jesús A; Benavides, Ligia R; Corbett, Kevin F; Gavish-Regev, Efrat; Harvey, Mark S; Monsma, Scott; Santibáñez-López, Carlos E; Setton, Emily V W; Zehms, Jakob T; Zeh, Jeanne A; Zeh, David W; Sharma, Prashant P (2021-05-19). Pupko, Tal (ed.). "Taxonomic Sampling and Rare Genomic Changes Overcome Long-Branch Attraction in the Phylogenetic Placement of Pseudoscorpions". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 38 (6): 2446–2467. doi:10.1093/molbev/msab038. ISSN 1537-1719. PMC 8136511. PMID 33565584.
  10. ^ a b Ballesteros, Jesús A; Santibáñez-López, Carlos E; Baker, Caitlin M; Benavides, Ligia R; Cunha, Tauana J; Gainett, Guilherme; Ontano, Andrew Z; Setton, Emily V W; Arango, Claudia P; Gavish-Regev, Efrat; Harvey, Mark S; Wheeler, Ward C; Hormiga, Gustavo; Giribet, Gonzalo; Sharma, Prashant P (2022-02-03). Teeling, Emma (ed.). "Comprehensive Species Sampling and Sophisticated Algorithmic Approaches Refute the Monophyly of Arachnida". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 39 (2): msac021. doi:10.1093/molbev/msac021. ISSN 0737-4038. PMC 8845124. PMID 35137183.
  11. ^ Greenwood, Veronique (2022-02-18). "Act of 'Heresy' Adds Horseshoe Crabs to Arachnid Family Tree". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  12. ^ "Leg genes give spiders segmented heads". cosmosmagazine.com. 2018-03-27. Retrieved 2023-05-10.
  13. ^ Setton, Emily V. W.; Sharma, Prashant P. (2018-04-10). "Cooption of an appendage-patterning gene cassette in the head segmentation of arachnids". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 115 (15): E3491–E3500. doi:10.1073/pnas.1720193115. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 5899462. PMID 29581309.
  14. ^ Gainett, Guilherme; Ballesteros, Jesús A.; Kanzler, Charlotte R.; Zehms, Jakob T.; Zern, John M.; Aharon, Shlomi; Gavish-Regev, Efrat; Sharma, Prashant P. (December 2020). "Systemic paralogy and function of retinal determination network homologs in arachnids". BMC Genomics. 21 (1): 811. doi:10.1186/s12864-020-07149-x. ISSN 1471-2164. PMC 7681978. PMID 33225889.
  15. ^ Wu, Katherine J. (2021-08-03). "You've Never Seen Legs Like These". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  16. ^ "How the daddy-long-legs gets long legs". Nature. 596 (7871): 167. 2021-08-05. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02127-z.

External links edit

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