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The biologist using insect eggs to overturn evolutionary doctrine

Cassandra Extavour has transformed understanding of animal development — while championing diversity, and nurturing a side career as a soprano.
  1. Giorgia Guglielmi

    1. Giorgia Guglielmi is a science journalist in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Cassandra Extavour photographed at Harvard University 2019

Credit: Juliette Halsey for Nature

By the spring of 1998, Cassandra Extavour had spent more than two years failing to get her PhD off the ground. She had moved from her native Toronto in Canada to a pioneering laboratory in Madrid, where she was trying to engineer the eggs of fruit flies to have two different genetic make-ups. But she hit hurdle after hurdle, and nobody in the lab could help. If she couldn’t make the flies within the next few months, she would have to quit the project.

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Nature 571, 24-26 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02040-6

References

  1. Extavour, C. G. & Akam, M. Development 130, 5869–5884 (2003).

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  2. Church, S. H., Donoughe, S., de Medeiros, B. A. S. & Extavour, C. G. Nature 571, 58–62 (2019).

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  3. Donoughe, S. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 4133–4138 (2014).

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  4. Nakamura, T. & Extavour, C. G. Development 143, 255–263 (2016).

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  5. Ewen-Campen, B., Srouji, J. R., Schwager, E. E. & Extavour, C. G. Curr. Biol. 22, 2278–2283 (2012).

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