Joseph Edward Rall

My current work is directed towards understanding the role of steroid/thyroid hormone receptors. These receptors bind small hydrophobic molecules, many of them hormones, and by binding to DNA, regulate gene activity. Most of the work on them has been done in vertebrates and I have become interested in when and where they appeared in the phylogenetic history. Since no fossil material could be retrieved I have been interested in primitive forms and identified one in one the most primitive diploblasts. A large group of them have been found in a nematode and we are attempting to determine the function of some of these.