Dr Victoria Sleight is part of an international research team that has secured a research grant from the Human Frontier Science Programme (HFSP), one of the world’s most competitive and sought‑after funding schemes for fundamental science.
The $1.2 million award will support a three‑year project bringing together researchers in the UK, United States and Japan to explore the genetic origins of evolutionary novelty using the diversity of molluscs.
The project aims to uncover how new biological features arise over evolutionary time. Rather than relying solely on the emergence of entirely new genes, the research focuses on gene family expansion - a process in which genes are duplicated, creating multiple copies that can then evolve new functions.
