The Evolution of Animal Complexity
This video was shortlisted for the Nature Science-in-Shorts competition 2024
This video was produced together with Bastian Fromm who runs a lab at the Arctic University of Norway. Bastian’s research focuses on small RNAs, in particular microRNAs, and how they contribute to the evolution of animal complexity. One of the best measures of the complexity of an organism is the number of cell types it possesses, which reflects the phenotypic intricacy of the species.
Turns out that the number of cell types in a given animal species strongly correlates with the number of microRNAs encoded in its genome. This puts microRNAs on the map as one of the main drivers of phenotypic complexity. We used LEGO bricks as a metaphor for cell-types, the builiding blocks of life to showcase how different genomic features contribute to the evolution of complexity in the animal kingdom
