Tomislav Domazet-Lošo

Tomislav Domazet-Lošo (Split, 1974) is a Croatian geneticist. His fields of interest are evolutionary genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, macroevolution and tumor evolution. He is employed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute as a research fellow.

Education

Tomislav Domazet-Lošo, son of Croatian Admiral Davor Domazet-Lešo, was born in Split in 1974. In 1997, he graduated biology at the Faculty of Science in Zagreb, and, in 2003, he received his Ph.D. degree in genetics at the University of Cologne Institute for Genetics.

Research

In 2007, he discovered a method of genomic philostratigraphy which states that every living organism in its genome carries a record of its evolutionary path. Hence, it is possible to read the evolutionary history of the species. In his lecture on September 17, 2007, in the Hall of the Matthias of Croatia, Domazet-Lošo presented the first ever philostratigraphic maps. Before this discovery, the only direct approach to the research of evolutionary history was to study and compare the fossil remains discovered at sites all over the world. Since it is impossible to predict where certain fossils are to be found, evolutionary research is largely dependent on good fortune in the discovery of high quality paleontological finds. The theory of genomic philostratigraphy solved this problem.

Domazet-Lošo and his associates have shown that parts of the body are exposed more to the environment have a higher chance to be affected by environmental evolutionary changes. Furthermore, they managed to show the sequence of so-called embryonic 'leaflets' that are produced in the newly conceived organism in the first days of development which is the cause of further development of all other tissues in further development. Finally, they discovered a possible genetic cause of the so-called Cambrian explosion, an event that intrigued even Charles Darwin, when almost 540 million years ago in a geologically brief period, nearly all existing animal forms have suddenly disappeared. The method, on the other hand, cannot see relatively tiny events like the separation of man and chimpanzee. The widespread scientific work of Dr. Tomislav Domazet-Loš and his associates was premiered in Split at the 5th World Conference on Forensic Genetics and Molecular Anthropology.

Domazet's work is a powerful proof of the theory of evolution, although it is assumed that the evolutionary history of the species of 200 years has been mirrored in animal embryonic development, but has not been scientifically confirmed so far. Novelty is in the discovery of statistics-based genomic phylostratigraphy, which is based on statistics and which can measure the overall evolutionary age of active genes during each stage of embryonic development. The genomic phylostratiphraphic method is excellent for the reconstruction of the distant evolutionary past, for example, fifty million or one billion years old, which could only be studied solely with the help of fossils. The loin method was experimentally demonstrated three years ago and the research was done on a zebra fish. With the help of genomic phylostratigraphy, it has been shown that approximately in the middle of embryonic development there is a period when all vertebrae are morphologically similar. At this stage, which is called filetypes, differences in the appearance of fish, reptiles, and mammals are almost insignificant.

Genome phylostratigraphy opens up new chapters in research of hard-to-resolve problems in biology and medicine, and it could be particularly important to understand the understanding of tumor genetics. Domazet-Lošo and his team, for the first time, have shown in research on hydrates that even simple organisms may have tumors, and it follows that the possibility of tumor development is actually an immanent feature of multiplicity. The usefulness of this information for medicine is huge, and the scale is unpredictable.