Cheryl is a graduate student who is exploring the mechanisms that allow insect versions of the Abd-A Hox protein to repress limbs, while some crustacean versions of Abd-A are incapable of limb repression. She is also working with Mike in studying whether phosphorylation of a casein kinase 2 site in a crustacean Ubx protein is sufficient to inhibit its ability to repress downstream genes.
Ella is a postdoc from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is testing whether crustacean and spider Hox proteins (that are expressed in limbed or limbless regions of those arthropod embryos) can repress limbs when expressed in developing Drosophila embryos. She is also mapping the repression and activation domains in the Drosophila Ultrabithorax protein, and determining its mechanism of repressing Distalless and other target genes.
Michelle Juarez
Michelle is a postdoc from the State University of New York, Stony Brook and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She is developing genetic screens in Drosophila, to identify new components of a novel wound response pathway. She is also exploring the role of Grainy head, a key component of the Drosophila wound response pathway, in epidermal barrier development of other basal metazoans.
Joe Pearson
Joe is a graduate student who is using bioinformatics and experimental methods to study the evolution of transcriptional enhancer DNA at the structural and functional level, with the goal being to understand how an enhancer can change at the sequence level drastically, yet still provide nearly identical patterns of expression in widely divergent species.
Dave Kosman
Dave is a researcher who is developing multiplex in situ hybridization methods, attempting to detect up to 6 different transcripts (labeled with different fluorescent markers) simultaneously in a single embryo. One goal being the rigorous determination of gene expression patterns at the cellular level. This data will be digitized and put into a format that will allow the information to be integrated with microarray data and enhancer sequence data to help find and decode the cis-regulatory information in the Drosophila genome.
Derek Lemons
Gary Tedeschi
Adam Paré
Adam is a graduate student who is interested in using confocal techniques to visualize single Hox transcripts and their localization within cells. Specifically he is studying miRNA mediated targeting of transcripts to P-bodies, which are sites of mRNA degradation and/or storage within the cytoplasm. In addition Adam would like to use in situ staining to quantify Hox gene transcription rates in the nuclei of fixed Drosophila embryos.
Elyse Rodgers-Vieira
Elyse is a Lab Technician. She is helping initiate Drosophila genetic screens by constructing new stocks incorporating wound response elements. She also assists several lab members with molecular biology projects.