Congratulations to our 2021 graduates! 

In the picture below left to right:

Joshua Schaaf, Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry. Josh received the Nathan Luehrmann-Cowen Memmorial Award from CST. He has worked on a number of projects in the lab, including floxing tcf21 and, more recently, analysis of ChIP-seq data. Josh will stick around Temple for a 4+1 PSM in Bioinformatics.

Shannan Lowe, Bachelor of Science in Biology. Shannan received the Dr. Nina W. Hillman Memmorial Award from CST. She has mostly worked on structure-function analysis of tbx20 in vivo, isolating and analyzing mutants in the two repressor domains and - perhaps - the activation domain. Shanna is off to Texas to prep for Vet School.

Carlee MacPherson Cunningham, Doctor of Philosophy. Carlee was a graduate student in Ray Habas' lab, but I will gladly claim her as an honorary member of my own lab since she published with us. Carlee has already started her new job at Envision Pharma.

Well, mutations in the morpholino binding site should suppress the phenotype - and they do! The origins of this paper go back to the 2018 Zebrafish Meeting in Madison, WI, where Carlee and I were discussing the challenges of ascertaining morphant phenotypes and decided to give this particular solution a try. Short 2.5 years later (no irony here!), the paper is out. I hope you find it interesting and useful: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71708-1
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Darius

Back in June our main genome editor, cardiac surgeon and the boss of the fish facility Leonard Burg has earned his PhD. On Monday Lenny is starting his postdoc at CHOP. Best of luck - miss you already!

Three of our recent undergrad alumni started Graduate Schools this fall. In the order in which they joined the lab:
Karen Zhang (2014-2016, second author of Burg et al., 2016) has joined the Chemistry PhD program at U Penn.
Nick Palmer (2016-2018, second author of Burg et al., 2016) has joined the Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics  PhD program at U Penn.
Helen Rueckert (2017-2018, co-author of Burg et al., 2018) has joined the Developmental and Stem Cell  Biology PhD program at Duke.

Congratulations! Very proud of you guys! But do keep in mind this was the easy part :-)

Way back in the day when research conferences were face-to-face, Shannan Lowe presented her work  deciphering the function of the two repressor domains of Tbx20 at the Temple CST URP symposium. The word "presented" does not do Shannan justice here: she took home the  second place award ! There were over 60 posters presented, ranging in topics from Biology to Physics and Computer Science. Way to go Shannan!

More info about the event can be found on CST URP website.

A paper published in PNAS late last year claims proof of paternal inheritance of mitochondria. As every student who took Genetics at Temple will tell you, that would be quite a paradigm-shifting discovery. But perhaps there is a difference between evidence for mtDNA and evidence for mitochondria themselves? Very glad to have been offered an opportunity to contribute to this discussion.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2019.00518/full
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Noah Goff has graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry. Noah has worked on two very different projects in the lab: epitope tagging of Tbx5a and assessment of CRISPR/Cas9-induced homology directed repair. As if that was not enough, Noah is now helping out on the Tbx20 project before he moves to Michigan State to start in their PhD program.
Noah received the Debra and Stanley Lefkowitz Undergraduate Research Award for his accomplishments. Well deserved and congrats!

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"?