The research interests and experience within this laboratory falls into the area broadly defined as evolution of developmental mechanisms. Our particular approach for understanding conserved and divergent properties of animal development is to compare architectural organization of gene regulatory networks (GRNs). GRN models consider not only the expression domains and function of many regulatory genes (mostly transcription factors), but importantly their inter-relationships. The construction of GRNs involves the use of cutting edge embryological and molecular biological technologies to study gene expression and to undertake gene perturbation, gene transfer and cis -regulatory analyses. Since our work is comparative these techniques must often be adapted for use in non-model organisms. The relationships between regulatory genes are portrayed as a network diagrams. We use a variety of marine invertebrates, particularly echinoderms, for our research. This is due largely to the fact that the most extensive GRN currently exists for the sea urchin embryo (see http://sugp.caltech.edu/endomes/) and the starfish has been shown to be an excellent comparative model. Also marine invertebrates represent the largest morphological diversity on the planet and present a wealth of opportunity to explore the association between development, phenotype and evolution.