Department Seminar

Today, David McCauley, an assistant professor of Zoology gave us a talk about his research since he arrived in OU about SoxE gene in lamprey.

His research is the regulation of genetic interactions on the development and evolution of neural crest. Only vertebrates have neuronal crest and the progenitor cells of neuronal crest differentiate through three streams of migration into the embryo, giving rise to cartilage, neurons and muscles.

They modified the existing staining with Alcian Blue into a new technology which works in lamprey to show clearly the structures of branchial arch. With this technique, they defined that the branchial arch in lamprey consist of two types of cartilage, morph I which appear in stacks of flattened cells and skeletal rods and morph II which is made of round cells and less flexible.

He is working on a gene called SoxE which has been proven necessary for the development of branchial arch in zebrafish and Africa clawed frog. With the newly invented technique, they have found the expression of SoxE in lamprey branchial arch. With mopholino (injection of complementary RNA which cannot be recognized and cleaved by endogenous enzymes so as to inhibit the expression of a certain gene) they verified that the loss of SoxE result in developmental defect of branchial arch. Mopholinos targeting different isoforms of SoxE demonstrate that SoxE1 and E2 are required for branchial arch formation and E3 is responsible for morphogenesis of branchial arch. Also, they determined the negative regulation of SoxE on collagen gene, Col2a1.