How Tortoises Grow Their Scales: Two Systems, One Head
June 23rd, 2025
Chemical signals versus mechanical stress: tortoise head scales reveal nature’s dual process.
Laboratory of Artificial & Natural Evolution (LANE)
Welcome to the website of the Milinkovitch - Tzika lab.
In a nutshell, our highly multidisciplinary team of biologists, bioinformaticians, physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians and 3D artists investigates the developmental and evolutionary mechanisms generating Life’s complexity and diversity (or maybe should we say ‘Life’s Beauty’). We investigate multiple non-classical model species, mainly reptiles and ‘exotic’ mammals, that can inform us on yet unknown exciting biological and physical processes generating this complex and diverse living world.
Central to our reasoning is that a proper understanding of the complexity and diversity of organismal forms cannot be achieved without integrating the physical constrains acting on the developmental and Darwinian processes. Our research requires integrating data and methods from comparative genomics, molecular developmental genetics, as well as physical experiments, mathematical modelling and numerical simulations. More specifically, we investigate the interactions between physical (mechanics, reaction-diffusion) and biological (cell signalling, proliferation) mechanisms that generate and constrain the variety and complexity of skin appendages (scales, hairs, spines), skin colours (pigmentary and structural), and skin colour patterns in tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates).
Use the navigation bar at the top of the page, to explore our research topics (what we do), our scientific approach and animal models (how we do it), our scientific motivation (why we do it), and our team (who does it).
All 2023 members of the LANE at our annual retreat on the Geneva lake.
What's new?
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From Mathematics to Biology… and back
May 14th, 2025
We provide a cell-biology effective interpretation of the celebrated Ising model in the framework of lizard skin colour patterning.
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Our new research makes the cover of the journal Open Biology
April 22nd, 2025
Pharmacological perturbation can abolish chemical skin appendage patterning and replace it with mechanical folding.
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We make the cover of PLOS Biology
April 14th, 2025
The editorial team of PLOS Biology selects one of our light-sheet microscopy images.