Professor Devi Stuart-Fox awarded more than $1m to study vivid reptile skin pigments

Professor Devi Stuart-Fox has been awarded a more than $1 million by the International Human Frontier Science Program Organisation (HFSPO) to study a special class of pigment causing vivid skin colours in reptiles.

Professor Stuart-Fox and her team, which includes Dr Athanasia Tzika from the University of Geneva and Dr Benjamin Palmer from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, were awarded USD $1.14 million for three years to study a special class of pigment found in many animals.

Titled New ways to generate color: light manipulation by crystal-forming pigments, their research will explore how these pigments contribute to vivid skin colours in reptiles.

Professor Stuart-Fox said: “HPSFO funding is unique because it is explicitly interdisciplinary, our team includes myself - an evolutionary ecologist - as well as a molecular developmental biologist and a physical chemist,”

“By combining our expertise, we will be able to discover novel optical materials, their molecular control and how they contribute to vivid colours in living skin.”

As an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and co-chair of the Hallmark Research Initiative in BioInspiration, Professor Stuart-Fox has published extensively on the evolution of animal coloration.

The HFSPO collaborative research grants are given for a broad range of interdisciplinary projects under the theme ‘Complex mechanisms of living organisms.’

For 2022, HFSPO awarded USD $37 million to support the top 4 per cent of applicant teams over the next 3 years. Professor Stuart-Fox’s project was successful after a year-long rigorous selection process in a global competition that started with 716 submitted letters of intent, involving scientists and laboratories in more than 50 countries.