Herve Seligmann
Hervé Seligmann\'s focus on mitochondrial DNA developed when searching for molecular mechanisms explaining developmental stability in lizards, a major topic in his PhD thesis. He described already >5 molecular processes affecting whole organism morphology and life history traits. This lead to uncover 4 types of cryptic coding systems, which he describes for vertebrate mitochondria. These range from switches between alternative genetic codes (mainly stop codon translation), expanded codons, and several alternative transcriptions, based on systematic alterations of the template DNA (research ongoing).