Research Highlights from the JCC Community
The JCC is pleased to share recent research by current and former JCC Fellows.
JCC Fellow Feng Chen, in Holger Willenbring’s lab at UCSF, contributed to a study showing that when disease or injury causes a shortage in one critical type of liver cell, the organ can instruct another type of liver cell to change identities to provide replacement supplies. The work was published in Nature.
JCC Fellow Emily Maclary and her colleagues discovered that different versions of a single gene, called NDP (Norrie Disease Protein), have unexpected links between color patterns in pigeons, and vision defects in humans. Maclary is a postdoc in Mike Shapiro’s lab at the University of Utah. The work was published in eLife.
William Pastor and his colleagues discovered that TFAP2C regulates transcription in human naive pluripotency by opening enhancers. The finding, published in Nature Cell Biology, explains a key stage that human embryonic cells must pass through before implantation. Pastor was a JCC Fellow in Steven Jacobsen’s lab at UCLA from 2012 to 2015 and is now Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at McGill University.
Jeffrey Farrell co-led a zebrafish study that “reconstructs the transcriptional trajectories of a vertebrate embryo, highlights the concurrent canalization and plasticity of embryonic specification, and provides a framework to reconstruct complex developmental trees from single-cell transcriptomes.” The results were published in Science. Farrell is a postdoc in Alexander Schier’s lab at Harvard University and was a JCC Fellow from 2013 to 2016.
Postdoc Alejandro Burga-Ramos led a study in Leonid Kruglyak’s lab at UCLA that discovered the genetic changes that contributed to loss of flight in the Galapagos cormorant. In humans, mutations to these genes can cause bone-development disorders known as ciliopathies. The results were published in Science. Burga-Ramos was a JCC Fellow from 2013 to 2016.