As far as I go, this paper is one more proof of how similar fish and mice are. Tip of the hat goes to Anuj Mehta, Temple undergrad (now Medical Student at Penn State) who worked on this project shuttling between the Main Campus and the Medical School, and to CST Undergraduate Research Program for supporting him. 

Our work engineering conditional zebrafish mutants was discussed in the February Issue of Lab Animal:
www.nature.com/articles/s41684-018-0229-y

And for a brief moment, I thought they put a picture of me on the cover. How delusional :-D

Our paper describing engineering of conditional mutants using CRISPR/Cas9 has been published in PLOS Genetics. The work was done in collaboration with Didier Stainier's lab at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research. Lenny Burg (tuc33231(at)temple.edu) and I (darius(at)temple.edu) would be happy to answer any questions to help you make it work in your lab. Let's flox!

Darius

P.S. A question for linguists: would it be OK to call a Cre-reverted gene trap mutant "Crevertant"? 

Diana did an excellent job getting the project off the ground. Then Viktorija took over and powered through learning to perform ventricular resection, trying various ways to re-mutate tbx5a, and a number of other experiments which did not make the final cut. Retrospectively we spent too much time trying to perfect the story and should have published it a couple of years ago. Nonetheless, here it is!

Lenny Burg is giving a talk on some of our genome editing advances. Excellent job!

June 5, 2018: Lenny Burg and Carlee McPherson Cunningham (Habas lab) making new embryo collection cups

To read more about Ralph's undergraduate research and future plans, click here. Well done Ralph!

​Two of our genome editors, Helen Rueckert and Ralph (Casey) St. Luce, are about to hang up their DNA pens for a while. Ralph joined our lab as a sophomore back in spring of 2016 and has contributed to several projects, but his lasting legacy will be in epitope tagging of tbx20.  Helen joined our lab for both semesters of her senior year after summer research in Ireland and has worked on mutagenesis of the aldh1a2 gene. Before the Temple Biology Poster session where the photos below were taken, they did a nice job cleaning up on the awards front as well: Helen received the Dr. Nina W. Hillman Memorial Award and Ralph received the AMP Award for Research. Ralph is will pursue his MD degree at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, while Helen will take a gap year before – you guessed it – applying to Medical School as well. Both are going to make terrific doctors one day!

Congratulations to our alumni Nicole Lester and Rachel Paul for matching with their #1 choices for Genetic Counseling MS programs! Nicole graduated from Temple University in 2014, and her undergraduate research was on testing human enhancers in zebrafish, while Rachel is a 2017 graduate who worked on fli1a/fli1b double mutants.

Viktorija Grajevskaja has successfully defended her doctoral thesis at Vilnius University. Well done!