MCDB seminar will be from Dwon Jordana from the Clark lab will be presenting their research titled:
Title: Identification of novel enhancers in eye development
Friday, February 28, 2025
A219B Langley Hall
12:00 PM
Normal eye development requires the precise orchestration of gene expression to give rise to proper anatomical structures of the eye. While much is known about the genes required for eye development, considerably less effort has been put into characterizing ocular regulatory regions, such as enhancers. While enhancers can be difficult to identify, their study is highly important because they modulate the temporal and spatial expression patterns of a gene. Putative enhancers can be identified in various ways, including evolutionary conservation, chromatin marks, and chromatin conformation capture-based methods to name a few. However, understanding the phenotypic effects resulting from perturbation to enhancer regions is much more challenging. In this talk, I will outline the approaches I am using to identify novel enhancers, the use of transposon-based transgenesis to generate and characterize expression patterns, and the application of CRISPR-Cas9 to delete regions and test their necessity. Additionally, I will discuss techniques for identifying detrimental mutations that impair enhancer function and may contribute to disease.
My research focuses on Rax, a gene that serves as an early determinant of the eye field. I selected regions of interest potentially relevant to Rax expression within a 2-megabase window surrounding the gene, identifying 20 candidate regions. So far, my work has led to the discovery of five novel ocular enhancers, all of which demonstrate the ability to drive expression in the embryonic eye and brain of developing zebrafish embryos.