A Study of Information Processing in the Sea Urchin Embryo by Rewiring Mesodermal Gene Regulatory Networks and cis-Regulatory Analysis of Skeletogenic Regulators

Citation

Damle, Sagar S. (2011) A Study of Information Processing in the Sea Urchin Embryo by Rewiring Mesodermal Gene Regulatory Networks and cis-Regulatory Analysis of Skeletogenic Regulators. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/186Z-VJ85. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:01202011-110522273

Abstract

This work focuses on the GRNs specifying embryonic skeletogenesis and the pigment cell differentiation in the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. These networks make predictions about the necessity of regulatory gene expression and cis-regulatory wiring for directing development. Here, these predictions are tested in a novel way, by add regulatory linkages to the GRN, and effectively rewiring development at the level of genomic DNA. The rewiring experiment presented here showed a previously unknown repression function for the pigment-cell terminal differentiation regulator, gcm, on an important regulator of skeletogenesis, alx1. This result motivated a complete cis-regulatory analysis of alx1 that identified a potential mechanism for gcm repression. Finally, this work describes a method for measuring GFP reporter activity in live sea-urchin embryos that will permit real-time cis-regulatory analysis.

Thesis Files