Welcome to the LOWE LAB

Our research focusses on the evolution of body plans. Most of our work involves the early evolution of deuterostomes and the origin of our own phylum, the chordates, but we are broadly interested in what marine invertebrate development can tell us about the early evolution of animals. Research in the lab focusses on hemichordate development, but we also work on a variety of echinoderm species, abalone and cnidarians. 

We use hemichordate development to investigate the evolution of nervous systems and the origin of chordates, evolution of gene regulatory networks,  and to investigate the evolution of life history. We use both descriptive and functional approaches using conventional developmental technologies, and are now developing a more explicitly genomic approach by developing single cell RNA-seq data sets.