I am a 3rd-year undergraduate student at University of Colorado Boulder studying Ecology & Evolutionary Biology as well as Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. I have worked in Medeiros Lab for 1.5 years. I first began my work at Medeiros Lab as an assistant to PhD student Zachary Root. I was introduced to Zachary's research through an EBio graduate/undergraduate mixer, and I was fascinated by his genetic approaches to investigating jaw evolution through the lamprey model. I was trained by Zack in various evo-devo experimental approaches such as fluorescent in situ hybridization, CRISPR/Cas 9 mutagenesis, DNA extraction and transformation, and probe synthesis. Currently I am working on my independent project- investigating tendon development in lamprey and its implications for vertebrate morphological evolution.
I am interested in the evolution of tendon development in vertebrates and its genetic basis in lamprey. Studying tendon tissue is important because of its interactions with muscles and its role in muscle regeneration after injury. There have been few studies on the genetic basis of tendon development in vertebrates, and my work would be the first to study this in lamprey. A better understanding of which genes are used to build tendons in lamprey embryos would inform us on the developmental evolution of these cells and which genes could be used in stem cell research in injury recovery. My project will look at a variety of genes in lamprey that are present across vertebrates that are known to be involved in tendon development. My project will help us understand how these genes coordinate to build this tissue across vertebrates. I predict that the genes I am testing have a conserved function in vertebrates and will thus be involved in building lamprey tendon tissue. Likewise, I predict that they will share similarities with related cell types. Overall, my work will further our understanding of the genetic mechanisms of vertebrate tendon development.