Dr. Peter A. V. Anderson

Director of the Whitney Laboratory
Professor of Physiology and Functional Genomics, Neuroscience and Zoology

Research Program:
Lower invertebrates such as jellyfish and flatworms offer remarkable opportunities for understanding fundamental biological principles. They do so for two broad reasons. First, they are structurally far simpler than mammals and other vertebrates and, as such, offer many experimental advantages. Second, because they have been evolving independently from ourselves for something of the order of 700 million years. A comparison of the genes that code for important proteins shared by both jellyfish and man permits functional differences in the respective proteins to be correlated with changes in their amino acid composition and, hence, structure. This approach provides a useful insight into how important proteins function. Over the years, our research has taken advantage of both these features of jellyfish to better understand how nervous systems, and components of the nervous system, particularly ion channels, function.