Hopi Hoekstra

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Danielle Hopi Elizabeth Hoekstra (born July 11, 1972 ) is an American evolutionary biologist and Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University . She is also a curator of mammals at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.

Hoekstra's family has Dutch ancestry. She went to school in Palo Alto , studied biology at the University of California, Berkeley (bachelor's degree in integrative biology in 1995) and received her PhD in zoology from the University of Washington in 2000 . She was a post-doctoral student at the University of Arizona . In 2003 she became an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego . In 2007 she became an associate professor and in 2010 she became a full professor at Harvard. She is also Harvard College Professor from 2014 to 2019.

In 2014 she also became a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . She's at the Broad Institute.

She investigates the genetics of the evolutionary development of complex behavior. She mainly uses mice as experimental animals. For example, in white-footed mice (Peromyscus), she located four locations in the genome that determine the tunnel length of their nests. In doing so, she crossed a species of white-footed mouse with complex tunnels (including escape tunnels) with one that produced rather simple structures. Of the four DNA regions, three (on chromosome 1, 2, 20) contributed to the determination of the tunnel length (but this is not entirely hereditary) and one region on chromosome 5 was responsible for whether or not an escape tunnel was created. Further investigations try to break down the digging behavior into smaller units in order to explore the exact nature of the genetic coding of the digging behavior.

Other behaviors are also genetically examined in her laboratory. For example, her colleague Andrés Bedesky genetically examined the behavior during the rearing of the offspring and localized twelve different locations in the genome, which are responsible, for example, for nest building or carrying the young back into the nest. Eight of the twelve spots had different behavioral effects in males and females.

In work on the genetics of the coat color of mice (adapted to the color of the background of their environment), she showed that these were caused by nine separate mutations in a single gene (agouti) and, even before that, that the change in a single amino acid contributed to the color change .

In 1997 she published on the interaction between bears and humans in Yellowstone Park.

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2016), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017) and the American Philosophical Society (2018). In 2015 she received the Richard Lounsbery Award and in 1998 the Ernst Mayr Award of the Society of Systematic Biologists.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jesse N. Weber, Brent K. Peterson, Hopie E. Hoekstra: Discrete genetic modules are responsible for the evolution of complex burrowing behavior in deer mice, Nature, Volume 493, 2013, pp. 4202-4205
  2. ↑ James Gorman, Study Discovers DNA That Tells Mice How to Construct Their Homes , New York Times, January 16, 2013
  3. ↑ Johann Grolle, Grammar of Digging, Der Spiegel, No. 27, 2017, p. 116
  4. ↑ P. polionotus, Coastal Mouse
  5. ↑ P. maniculatus, deer mouse that lives in the forest
  6. ↑ CR Linnen, Hoekstra u. a .: Adaptive evolution of multiple traits through multiple mutations at a single gene, Science, Volume 339, 2013, pp. 1312-1316
  7. ↑ Hoekstra et al. a., A single amino acid mutation contributes to adaptive beach mouse color pattern, Science, Volume 313, 2006, pp. 101-104
  8. ↑ Gunther, Hoekstra, Ursus, Volume 10, 1997, p. 377
personal data
SURNAME Hoekstra, Hopi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hoekstra, Danielle Hopi Elizabeth (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American molecular biologist and evolutionary biologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1972