PhD thesis

4 
Preface
This thesis presents the results of three years of research at the University of
Copenhagen from May 2007 until December 2010, including a research visit of
one year at the University of Barcelona in 2009. The research on neurogenesis,
myogenesis, and gene expression patterns in Brachiopoda was supervised by
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Andreas Wanninger at the Research Group for Comparative
Zoology, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The
research on gene expression patterns was mainly carried out in the lab of Prof.
Dr. Pedro Martinez, Department of Genetics, University of Barcelona, Spain.
The PhD project was funded by The Danish Agency for Science, Technology
and Innovation (grant no. 645-06-0294 to Andreas Wanninger).
This project included several research visits of altogether nine weeks at the
Sven Lovén Center for Marine Sciences in Kristineberg, Sweden, three weeks
at the Moreton Bay Research Station on North Stradbroke Island, Australia,
three weeks at the Banyuls-sur-mer Oceanological Observatory, France, and
ten weeks at the Friday Harbor Laboratories, USA. Additional impact on my
thinking about the field of evolution and development had the summer school on
Evolution and Development of the Metazoans by Prof. Dr. Billie Swalla and Prof.
Dr. Ken Halanych at the Friday Harbor Laboratories, University of Washington,
USA, the Summer School on Evolutionary Developmental Biology by Prof. Dr.
Alessandro Minelli and Assist. Prof. Giuseppe Fusco, University of Padua, Italy,
and the EMBO course on Marine Animal Models in Evolution and Development
organized by Prof. Dr. Detlev Arendt at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
This thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter I constitutes a short
introduction to the research field and discusses the presented results in a
broader perspective. Chapters II-IV contain two published papers and one
submitted manuscript, which report the major findings made during this PhD
project.
Copenhagen, December 2010
Andreas Altenburger