- Interview
- Open access
- Published:
Evolutionary development and morphological modifications of the brain: an interview with Angelika Stollewerk
BMC Biology volume 16, Article number: 117 (2018)
Abstract
Angelika Stollewerk is a Reader at Queen Mary University of London, where her lab uses a diverse range of species to study the evolution of the arthropod nervous system. Angelika spoke to us about social spiders, the future of evo-devo, and open peer review.
What are your current research interests?
I have lots of different interests but they all revolve around arthropods and the evolution of the nervous system. I like to work with many different species and one exciting new project involves two social spider species, which we have recently collected. We are looking for links between peripheral nervous system evolution and the evolution of sociality using gene expression and functional and behavioural approaches.

What are your predictions for the field over the next 5Â years?
The evo-devo research field has changed substantially over the past 10Â years. Rather than analyzing single genes, morphology and a handful of representatives for taxa/phyla, the field has moved on to generating transcriptomes of developmental stages, tissues and single cells and substantially increased the genome coverage, in particular in arthropods (e.g., [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]). One of the next steps (in my area) will be to systematically establish cell atlases for a large number of species across all phyla to identify evolutionary cell lineages and work out the different levels of evolutionary relationships between tissues, organs and cells.
What motivates you to provide peer review for journals?
I like reading brand new research! I also think peer review is an essential service to the academic community to ensure high quality publications and this responsibility should be shared by as many researchers as possible.
What changes, if any, would you make to the current system of peer review?
All journals should change to open peer review.
Website:
http://astollewerk.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/index.html and http://www.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/staff/angelikastollewerk.html.
References
Cao J, Packer JS, Ramani V, Cusanovich DA, Huynh C, Daza R, et al. Comprehensive single-cell transcriptional profiling of a multicellular organism. Science. 2017;357:661–7.
Torres-Olivia M, Schneider J, Wiegleb G, Kaufholz F, Posnien N. Dynamic genome wide expression profiling of Drosophla head development reveals a novel role of hunchback in retinal glia cell development and blood-brain barrier integrity. PLoS Gen. 2018;14:e1007180.
Plass M, Solana J, Wolf FA, Ayoub S, Misios A, Glazar P, et al. Cell type atlas and lineage tree of a whole complex animal by single-cell transcrioptomics. Science. 2018;360:875.
Schwager EE, Sharma PP, Clarke T, Leite DJ, Wierschin T, Pechmann M, et al. The house spider genome reveals an ancient whole-genome duplication during arachnid evolution. BMC Biol. 2017;15:62.
Chipman AD, Ferrier DE, Brena C, Qu J, Hughes DS, Schröder R, et al. The first myriapod genome sequence reveals conservative arthropod gene content and genome organisation in the centipede Strigamia maritima. PLoS Biol. 2014;12:e1002005.
Colbourne JK, Prender ME, Gilbert D, Thomas WK, Tucker A, Oakley TH, et al. The ecoresponsive genome of Daphnia pulex. Science. 2011;331:555–61.
Gulia-Nuss M, Nuss AB, Mezer JM, Sonenshine DE, Roe RM, Waterhouse RM, et al. Genomic insights into the Ixodes scapularis tick vector of Lyme disease. Nat Commun. 2016;7:10507.
Acknowledgements
Not applicable.
Funding
Not applicable.
Availability of data and materials
Not applicable.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
AS wrote the manuscript. AS read and approved the final manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The author declares she has no competing interests.
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
About this article
Cite this article
Stollewerk, A. Evolutionary development and morphological modifications of the brain: an interview with Angelika Stollewerk. BMC Biol 16, 117 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-018-0590-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-018-0590-8