Researcher profile: Carlos Guerrero Bosagna
Every plant and animal on Earth are the way they are because of evolution. One cornerstone of evolution is the concept of natural selection, that the most fit organism for a given environment will thrive and reproduce. Changes in an organism is usually attributed to random mutations and a few other factors, but what if the environment itself could influence the genome? What if there were more factors that affects evolutionary pathways than just natural selection? Questions like these are what drives Carlos Guerrero Bosagna.
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Carlos was interested in science from an early age. He played with technical toys and was very stubborn, trying things again and again until they worked. His father was a physical education university teacher and his mother was an obstetrician and that made him interested in evolution and reproduction.
“I followed my dad to his lectures and I developed an interest in the scientific method”, he says. “In fifth grade, the only book I was ahead in was Biology”, he continues.
During his undergrad in Biology, he was introduced to a theory called autopoiesis, which is a more holistic way to look at organisms. He then also started to question whether the concept of random mutations was the whole picture, or if there were other forces at play.
“Epigenetics connects the environment to phenotypic changes, but also the environment to the genome, in the sense that epigenetics changes can produce mutations”, he says.
Now, he studies epigenetic changes in inheritance. One thing he has found was that the living conditions of mothers can affect generations after.
“We have reported how environmentally induced diseases can be transgenerationally transmitted. One of the striking examples is the transgenerational transmission of polycystic ovaries in rodents after exposure to endocrine disruptors, which affected over 90 % of of the females in the study”
His research continues and there are several new project that he is looking forward to starting. The projects are divided into two fields, sustainability and evolution. On the sustainability side one project is identifying epigenetics in relation to stress response in chickens.
“We are studying in chickens how the epigenome of different parts of the brain respond to early life stress; we want to know which parts are affected most by stress and the role of epigenetics in this”, he says.
He will also investigate metabolic and reproductive consequences of exposure to environmental toxins. This relates to a newly obtained FORMAS grant.
“Using chickens, we want to develop a model to test the reproductive and metabolic consequences of early exposure to environmental toxicants and what epigenetic effects this exposure has” he says.
In his evolution project, he will study how metabolic disruptions trigger epigenetic effects in the germline by tracking changes across six generations. “This mimics an early speciation event in which two populations would be differentially exposed to environmental conditions” says Carlos.
Everything is not about science, though. When Carlos is not in the lab, the most important thing to him is spending time with his family and be a good father. He also tries to keep in shape.
“I swim once a week and I play football every Sunday” he says.
As our knowledge about evolution increases, the picture becomes more complicated, but also much richer.