The Kirby Lab as a whole is interested in studying heart development and the factors that lead to congenital heart problems. I hadn’t realized just how complex the process of cardiac development is until I came here, where each grad student is studying some different, though interrelated, aspect of heart development. My mentor Martha is specifically interested in studying the role of the neural crest cells in zebrafish cardiac development. While neural crest cell roles in mice and chick heart septation have been studied extensively, zebrafish pose a fresh and interesting question since zebrafish have only two-chambered hearts and to septa. We’re curious to see which neural crest cells are involved in the formation of the gill arch arteries and which signaling factors play a role in directing their migration. This summer I am helping Martha with her project on mapping the zebrafish cardiac neural crest cells.
Specifically, I will be looking at whether the protein endothelin-1 is required for migration of the cardiac neural crest cells to the gill arch arteries, and whether endothelin-1 is involved in the maintenance and/or formation of the gill arch arteries in our zebrafish. To that end, my work the past few weeks has revolved around injecting zebrafish embryos with morpholinos to block endothelin receptors and trying to determine whether our treatments are working. Before we can determine endothelin-1’s role in cardiac development, we have to make sure that the morpholinos are properly knocking out the endothelin receptors. From previous studies we know that when the endothelin receptors are blocked we see defects in the cartilage of the zebrafish jaw. So I’ve been doing a lot of cartilage staining recently to look at embryos injected with several different concentrations of morpholino to see if these fish show the deformed jaw phenotype we expect. Once we settle on an appropriate concentration, of morpholino, we can begin tracking and mapping the cells involved in cardiac development. But I’ve been coming up with some mixed results this week; some of the injected embryos I just finished injecting and staining have promisingly deformed jaws, but just as many look disappointingly normal (which sounds like such a sad thing to say…). I guess this means I’ll be doing more injecting next week
So I guess that’s basically my research project so far.For now,
