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Craig Hunter Research Images
Patterning gene expression in the C. elegans embryo PAL-1 mRNA, which is present in all the cells of early embryos, is first translated at the four-cell stage, but only in the two posterior cells (blue with red nuclei) and subsequently in their descendants. A focus of the lab is to understand the molecular details that first globally repress and then spatially and temporally derepress PAL-1 translation. Another focus of the lab is to understand how PAL-1 activity specifies and patterns posterior development. We are using microarrays, RNAi, embryology, and genetics to identify the genes controlled by pal-1 activity and to characterize the gene-regulatory network. |
