 Members of the faculty and students of the Universitat from Peu Fabra, dear Dr. Poyades, thank you very much for your kind words. And I would also like to thank the musicians and the artists who made this very pretty picture. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very honored to receiving this doctorate from this young, modern, and international University, Peu Fabra. Thank you all very much for your support. I am a biologist and spent most of my academic career in tubing in a small German university town. I've been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology since 1985 and retired in 2014. Most of my research has been devoted to the identification of genes controlling development, initially in the embryo of the fruit flight of Lamella Nugasta and more recently in the Zebrafish Daniorerio. Since 2014, I'm running a small research group investigating the development and evolution of color patterns. I will present a summary of my recent research on this topic in a seminar tomorrow. As much of you already have heard from Dr. Pouillardest, so it will be a little repetitive, but it's the same person, you know. I cannot invent something new now for you. I studied biology, physics, and chemistry, got a diploma in biochemistry at Tubingen University and did my graduate work on molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute for Virus Forschung in Tubingen. When I was searching for my own research topic, the problem of morphogenesis began to fascinate me. At our institute, the group of Alfred Gierer studied Hydra as a developmental system with the aim to isolate factors controlling regeneration in this simple animal. At this time, experimental approaches to study mechanisms of development in higher animals were very difficult and frustrating. At the same time, another group around Friedrich Bonhoeffer studied genetics of DNA replication in E. coli, the bacterium. This successful project convinced me that the genetic approach is very powerful to dissect complex processes. It might also work for the study of development. So I looked for an organism that allowed to study development with the methods of genetics. In the mid-1970s, Dr. Zaufela seemed the best choice for applying genetics to problems of developmental biology. It was the model organism in which the basic principles of chromosomal inheritance had been worked out. A small number of mutations had been identified at cost alteration in development. I joined the laboratory of Walter Gehring at the Biot-Centrum in Basel with a long-term goal to discover morphogens into Zaufela. During my post-doctoral time, 1975 to 1978, I got familiar with Zaufela genetics and embryology and developed methods allowing large-scale screening for mutations, affecting embryonic patterning. My first independent position was at the EMBL in Heidelberg when I shared a lab for three years with Eric Wieshaus, whom I had met in Basel. Eric and my common interest concerned segmentation of the Zaufela embryo. At the time, virtually nothing was known about segmentation and the determination of segment number in any organism. We set out to systematically screen for mutations affecting segment number and polarity. For the mutant screen, we choose a single dominant tissue of the larval body, the skin, with its cuticle. Mutations that affect patterning could be distinguished from those required for more general housekeeping functions by direct inspection of the larval cuticle patterns of mutant embryos. In our saturation screens, in which we were later joined by Gerd Jürgens, we scored embryos from about 20,000 inbred lines and identified 20 genes affecting segmentation. We also identified a total of 120 genes with essential and important functions in the development of the pattern of the larvae, representing 2.5% of all genes mutating to lethality in Zaufela. This mutant collection provided the material for the emergence of a new rapidly expanding field developmental genetics studied in many laboratories worldwide. Its success was speeded up by the development of recombinant DNA technology, which allowed the molecular cloning of the genes we had discovered. It was found that many encode transcription factors but also the components of most important signaling systems operating in all animals, such as, for example, wingless and hedgehog, were contained in our Heidelberg collection. By and large, the development of the embryo is controlled by a series of transcription factors distributed as molecular pre-patterns. By regulating each other, these patterns become refined until the molecular pattern directly determines the morphological pattern. From the EMVL, I went to the Friedrich-Miescher laboratory of the Max-Blanck-Sehrzhaft in Tübingen and we run and run an independent junior research group until 1985 when I was appointed director of the MPE for developmental biology, the position. Yeah. At the FML, we focused on genes determining the informational content of the egg cell operating in the maternal organism that produces the egg. We and others, notably the laboratory of Madame Gance in Gives-Urivet in France and Eric Vichars and Trudeau's laboratory in Princeton discovered about 30 maternally required genes that are involved in the axis determination of the embryo. The Anteopostia axis is determined independently from the Dorsuventral axis as mutations affect either the one or the other, never both. We discovered Bicoid and Oscar and the group of 10 genes determine the Dorsuventral axis including the genes Dorsal and Toll. In transplantation experiments, we found that the localized RNA products of Bicoid and Oscar were required to form two organizing centers with long range activity localized at the anterior and posterior of the egg, respectively. Bicoid encodes a transcription factor that is produced at the anterior tip of the egg from its pre-localized mRNA and spreads posteriorly to form a concentration gradient. Artificially changing the gradient results in a shift of the pattern. This was the first demonstration of a morphogen, a protein determining the pattern in a concentration dependent manner. We also unraveled the signaling systems determining the Dorsuventral axis with 11 components including Toll as membrane bound receptor and Spetzler as extracellular ligand. A morphogenetic gradient of Dorsal determines different regions along the Dorsuventral axis. However, the gradient is formed in this case by a differential uptake of the Dorsal protein into the blaster-dominoclein. Many excellent scientists have contributed to these findings and I would like to mention Rud Lehmann, Hans-Gerr-Frohnhofer, Wolfgang Driewer and Daniel St. Johnston who worked on the patterning along the anteposter axis and Catherine Anderson, Dave Stein and Siegfried Roth for their contribution to the understanding of the Dorsuventral axis. Drosophila as an insect model organism has rather special properties. It is in many respects very different from vertebrate animals. Therefore, it was not clear a priori to what extent the results obtained in Drosophila could be generalized and how much we could learn from them for an understanding of the development of vertebrates. When George Tricenter chose the zebrafish, a small freshwater sypionid as a vertebrate model organism to study development, I got fascinated by this animal. Zebrafish has transparent embryos which are rapidly developing outside the maternal organism and that thus ideally suited for a vivo inspection of embryonic development. We performed this time as a collaborative project of 12 scientists a large-scale mutagenesis experiment in which we isolated 1,200 mutants affecting the morphology of the embryo or lava at successive stages of development and defined over 300 novel genes. Affecting many aspects of early development such as gastrulation, segmentation, muscle formation, development of brain, heart, liver, skin, fin and sensory organs, which were followed up by collaborators establishing their own labs elsewhere. Work in my laboratory focused on traits that are distinct between insects and vertebrates. We have been investigating processes of cell and tissue migration in the lateral line nerve as well as in microglia, neural quest development, the development of the skin and structures shaping the adult body such as fins and scales. Our present project in my small emerita group focus on the development of the striped pigment pattern of the adult zebrafish which has established itself as the prime model for color pattern formation in vertebrates. Color patterns are prominent features of most animals. They are highly variable and evolve rapidly leading to large diversities between species even within a single genus. Their targets of natural as well as sexual selection but despite their high evolutionary significance little is known about their development and evolution. The zebrafish, Daniel Rario displays a conspicuous pattern of alternating blue and golden stripes on the body and on the anal and tail fins as you have seen in this pretty picture. Pigment cells in zebrafish, melanophores, eridophores and xanthophores originate from neural quest derived stem cells associated with the dorsal root ganglia of the peripheral nervous system. We discovered that the stem cells are pluripotent and give rise not only to the three pigment cell types but also to neurons innervating the skin and glia. All three cell types interact in a complex manner to form the alternating dark and light stripes in self-organization. The color patterns in closely related Daniel species are amazingly different ranging from vertical bars or spots or combinations of spots and stripes to no pattern at all. Their variation offers a great opportunity to investigate the basic genetic basis of color pattern evolution in vertebrates. Exciting technical developments of the recent years especially next generation sequencing technologies and the novel possibility of genome editing with CRISPR-Cas9 system allowed to expand from model organisms into other species and directly test the function of genes by targeted knockouts and allele replacements. Thus models and hypotheses about pigment pattern formation derived from zebrafish can now be tested in other Daniel species. These studies relay the foundation to understand not only the genetic basis of color pattern variation between Daniel species but also the evolution of color pattern in other vertebrates. In my talk tomorrow, I will highlight our recent exciting findings for those who want to know more details about this fascinating topic. I have published a small book called Animal Beauty Evolution of Biological Aesthetics at MRT Press. Thank you very much for your attention.