Genetics & Developmental Biology Stories
Genetics & Developmental Biology
Designer Genes: Ancient Switches that Shape our Bodies, Brains, and Health
September 16, 2014 Speaker: Dr. Matthew P. Scott Why do we look like our parents? We inherit particular versions of genes that shape our growth. For a long time these genes were unknown and it was...
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Genetics & Developmental Biology
Media Event: GM Awards Carnegie’s BioEYES Environmental Education Grant
Baltimore, MD--The General Motors Corporation is presenting a $5,000.00 award to Carnegie’s BioEYES K-12 educational program on September 11, 2014, to deliver a two-week environmental curriculum,...
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Genetics & Developmental Biology
Fertility: Sacrificing eggs for the greater good
Baltimore, MD— A woman’s supply of eggs is a precious commodity because only a few hundred mature eggs can be produced throughout her lifetime and each must be as free as possible from genetic damage...
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Genetics & Developmental Biology
Are developing heart valves sensitive to environmental chemicals?
Audio Baltimore, MD—Exposure to environmental endocrine disrupters, such as bisphenol A, which mimic estrogen, is associated with adverse...
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Genetics & Developmental Biology
What makes cell division accurate?
YouTubeBaltimore, MD— As all school-children learn, cells divide using a process called mitosis, which consists of a number of phases during...
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Genetics & Developmental Biology
Fatty Acids Crucial to Embryonic Development
AudioBaltimore, MD— One classical question in developmental biology is how different tissue types arise in the correct position of the...
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Genetics & Developmental Biology
The Smoking Gun: Fish Brains and Nicotine
AudioBaltimore, MD—In researching neural pathways, it helps to establish an analogous relationship between a region of the human brain and...
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Genetics & Developmental Biology
The Smoking Gun: Fish Brains and Nicotine
December 9, 2013 In researching neural pathways, it helps to establish an analogous relationship between a region of the human brain and the brains of more-easily studied animal species. New work...
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Understanding the musculoskeletal and hypothalamic systems
The Fan laboratory studies the molecular mechanisms that govern mammalian development, using the mouse as a model. They use a combination of biochemical, molecular and genetic approaches to identify and characterize signaling molecules and pathways that control the development and maintenance of...
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Left and right side differences of the developing brain
The Marnie Halpern laboratory studies how left-right differences arise in the developing brain and discovers the genes that control this asymmetry. Using the tiny zebrafish, Danio rerio, they explores how regional specializations occur within the neural tube, the embryonic tissue that develops into...
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Small RNAs in egg and sperm cell development
Approximately half of the gene sequences of human and mouse genomes comes from so-called mobile elements—genes that jump around the genome. Much of this DNA is no longer capable of moving, but is likely “auditioning”  perhaps as a regulator of gene function or in homologous...
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Meet Carnegie Scientists
Chen-Ming Fan
The mouse is a traditional model organism for understanding physiological processes in humans. Chen-Ming Fan uses the mouse to study the underlying mechanisms involved in human development and genetic diseases. He concentrates on identifying and understanding the signals that direct the...
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Yixian Zheng - Director
Yixian Zheng is Director of the Department of Embryology. Her lab has a long-standing interest in cell division. In recent years, their findings have broadened their research using animal models, to include the study of stem cells, genome organization, and lineage specification—how stem cells...
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Allan Spradling
Allan Spradling is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and director of the Department of Embryology. His laboratory studies the biology of reproduction particularly egg cells, which are able to reset the normally irreversible processes of differentiation and aging that govern all somatic...
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Possible therapeutic target for slow healing of aged muscles discovered
An age-related decline in recovery from muscle injury can be traced to a protein that suppresses the special ability of muscle stem cells to build new muscles, according to work from a team of...
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Allan Spradling comments on developmental biology story in The Scientist
Allan Spradling offers input to The Scientist on a paper about female Japanese rice fish producing sperm. More
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Glowing cholesterol helps scientists fight heart disease
A newly developed technique that shows artery clogging fat-and-protein complexes in live fish gave investigators from Carnegie, Johns Hopkins University, and the Mayo Clinic a glimpse of how to study...
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Kamena Kostova, courtesy Navid Marvi, Carnegie Institution for Science
Carnegie’s Kamena Kostova recognized by NIH for early career excellence
October 1, 2019

Baltimore, MD— Carnegie biologist Kamena Kostova has been selected for the Director’s Early Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health, which is designed to provide “exceptional junior scientists” with the opportunity to “skip traditional post-doctoral training and move immediately into independent research positions.”

Kostova is one of 13 recipients of the 2019 Early Independence Award. The recognition is part of a suite of four that comprise the NIH Director’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, which honors “highly innovative biomedical or behavioral research proposed by extraordinarily creative scientists.

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GDNF repairs aged muscle stem cells courtesy of Liangji Li.
Possible therapeutic target for slow healing of aged muscles discovered
September 30, 2019

Washington, DC— An age-related decline in recovery from muscle injury can be traced to a protein that suppresses the special ability of muscle stem cells to build new muscles, according to work from a team of current and former Carnegie biologists led by Chen-Ming Fan and published in Nature Metabolism.

Skeletal muscles have a tremendous capacity to make new muscles from special muscle stem cells. These “blank” cells are not only good at making muscles but also at generating more of themselves, a process called self-renewal. But their amazing abilities diminish with age, resulting in poorer muscle regeneration from muscle trauma.

The research team—

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This image captures the bright blue light (chemiluminesc ence) emitted by the NanoLuc protein in LipoGlo zebrafish. It is is provided courtesy of James Thierer.
Glowing cholesterol helps scientists fight heart disease
July 31, 2019

Baltimore, MD—A newly developed technique that shows artery clogging fat-and-protein complexes in live fish gave investigators from Carnegie, Johns Hopkins University, and the Mayo Clinic a glimpse of how to study heart disease in action. Their research, which is currently being used to find new drugs to fight cardiovascular disease, is now published in Nature Communications.

Fat molecules, also called lipids, such as cholesterol and triglycerides are shuttled around the circulatory system by a protein called Apolipoprotein-B, or ApoB for short. These complexes of lipid and protein are called lipoproteins but may be more commonly known as “bad cholesterol.”
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One analogy for understanding the mathematical structure of the team's work is to think of it as foam being simplified into a single bubble by progressively merging adjacent bubbles.
Can mathematics help us understand the complexity of our microbiome?
July 2, 2019

Baltimore, MD—How do the communities of microbes living in our gastrointestinal systems affect our health? Carnegie’s Will Ludington was part of a team that helped answer this question.

For nearly a century, evolutionary biologists have probed how genes encode an individual’s chances for success—or fitness—in a specific environment.

In order to reveal a potential evolutionary trajectory biologists measure the interactions between genes to see which combinations are most fit.  An organism that is evolving should take the most fit path. This concept is called a fitness landscape, and various mathematical techniques have been developed to

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The biology of reproduction studying ovarian stem cells of the fruitfly

The Spradling laboratory studies the biology of reproduction. By unknown means eggs reset the normally irreversible processes of differentiation and aging. The fruit fly Drosophila provides a favorable multicellular system for molecular genetic studies. The lab focuses on several aspects of egg development, called oogenesis, which promises to provide insight into the rejuvenation of the nucleus and surrounding cytoplasm. By studying ovarian stem cells, they are learning how cells maintain an undifferentiated state and how cell production is regulated by microenvironments known as niches. They are  also re-investigating the role of steroid and prostaglandin hormones in controlling

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Visualizing Lipid Metabolism and Signaling

In mammals, most lipids, such as fatty acids and cholesterol, are absorbed into the body via the small intestine. The complexity of the cells and fluids that inhabit this organ make it very difficult to study in a laboratory setting. The goal of the Farber lab is to better understand the cell and molecular biology of lipids within digestive organs by exploiting the many unique attributes of the clear zebrafish larva  to visualize lipid uptake and processing in real time.  Given their utmost necessity for proper cellular function, it is not surprising that defects in lipid metabolism underlie a number of human diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and atherosclerosis.

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The role of organelles in the cell nucleus that synthesize and process RNA

The Gall laboratory studies all aspects of the cell nucleus, particularly the structure of chromosomes, the transcription and processing of RNA, and the role of bodies inside the cell nucleus, especially the Cajal body (CB) and the histone locus body (HLB).

Much of the work makes use of the giant oocyte of amphibians and the equally giant nucleus or germinal vesicle (GV) found in it. He is particularly  interested in how the structure of the nucleus is related to the synthesis and processing of RNA—specifically, what changes occur in the chromosomes and other nuclear components when RNA is synthesized, processed, and transported to the cytoplasm.
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Small RNAs in egg and sperm cell development

Approximately half of the gene sequences of human and mouse genomes comes from so-called mobile elements—genes that jump around the genome. Much of this DNA is no longer capable of moving, but is likely “auditioning”  perhaps as a regulator of gene function or in homologous recombination, which is a type of genetic recombination where the basic structural units of DNA,  nucleotide sequences, are exchanged between two DNA molecules to  repair  breaks in the DNA  strands. Modern mammalian genomes also contain numerous intact movable elements, such as retrotransposon LINE-1, that use RNA intermediates to spread about the genome. 

Given

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Yixian Zheng - Director

Yixian Zheng is Director of the Department of Embryology. Her lab has a long-standing interest in cell division. In recent years, their findings have broadened their research using animal models, to include the study of stem cells, genome organization, and lineage specification—how stem cells differentiate into their final cell forms. They use a wide range of tools, including genetics in different model organisms, cell culture, biochemistry, proteomics, and genomics.

Cell division is essential for all organisms to grow and live. During a specific time in a cell’s cycle the elongated apparatus consisting of string-like micro-tubules called the spindle is assembled to

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Kamena Kostova

Staff Associate Kamena Kostova joined the Department of Embryology in November 2018. She studies ribosomes, the factory-like structures inside cells that produce proteins. Scientists have known about ribosome structure, function, and biogenesis for some time. But, a major unanswered question is how cells monitor the integrity of the ribosome itself. Problems with ribosomes have been associated with diseases including neurodegeneration and cancer. The Kostova lab investigates the fundamental question of how cells respond when their ribosomes break down using mass spectrometry, functional genomics methods, and CRISPR genome editing.

Kostova received a B.S. in Biology from the

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Allan Spradling

Allan Spradling is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and director of the Department of Embryology. His laboratory studies the biology of reproduction particularly egg cells, which are able to reset the normally irreversible processes of differentiation and aging that govern all somatic cells—those that turn into non-reproductive tissues. Spradling uses the fruit fly Drosophila because the genes and processes studied are likely to be similar to those in other organisms including humans. In the 1980s he and his colleague, Gerald Rubin, showed how jumping genes could be used to identify and manipulate fruit fly genes. Their innovative technique helped establish Drosophila

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Donald Brown - Emeritus

The Donald Brown laboratory uses  amphibian metamorphosis to study complex developmental programs such as the development of vertebrate organs. The thyroid gland secretes thyroxine (TH), a hormone essential for the growth and development of all vertebrates including humans. To understand TH, director emeritus Donald Brown studies one of the most dramatic roles of the hormone, the control of amphibian metamorphosis—the process by which a tadpole turns into a frog. He studies the frog Xenopus laevis from South Africa.

 Events as different as the formation of limbs, the remodeling of organs, and the resorption of tadpole tissues such as the tail are all directed by TH

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