Newts

I am currently pursuing a PhD at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) and Naturalis Biodiversity Center. Together with my colleagues I am investigating a particularly strange salamander syndrome...

The great crested newt (Triturus cristatus), which is widely distributed across Europe and Asia, is one of the nine Triturus newt species that has to deal with a strange genetic syndrome. Because of this syndrome, half of the eggs of these newts never hatch! It is basically a 'Russian roulette', with each offspring having a 50% chance of life. It is a phenomenon that has rarely been observed and described in nature.

Losing half of the reproductive output - by chance - is very disadvantageous in an evolutionary sense. One could therefore argue that natural selection will cause the deleterious mutations that cause this syndrome to quickly disappear from the DNA over time - but that does not seem to be happening! Scientists have been scratching their heads in confusion for hundreds of years already: how could such a crazy syndrome have evolved? And why is it maintained in nature?

Nowadays there are all kinds of modern techniques to obtain and examine DNA. In my PhD research I search for the 'errors' (in this case, the very harmful mutations) that underlie the mysterious syndrome. By comparing the eggs that make it to the eggs that do not make it, we will hopefully discover what is going wrong. And by comparing the DNA with other salamander species that do not suffer from this weird syndrome, we can also learn more about the evolution of it.