Summary
This CAREER project will investigate one of biology’s most fundamental questions: how entirely new genes with novel biological functions arise and help organisms adapt to challenging environments. The project uses fish antifreeze proteins, molecules that allow some fishes to survive in icy seawater, as a window into how evolution repeatedly solves the same problem through different genetic routes. By revealing how genomes generate new functions, the work will advance basic knowledge in evolutionary biology and genomics, with broader relevance to biotechnology and data-intensive biology. The pr
