Gene Regulatory Network for Zebrafish Eye Development

Eye development is orchestrated by scores of genetic pathways and gene families that control cell proliferation, specification and differentiation processes. A thorough understanding of the structure of the network and its regulation provides the foundation for the investigation of abnormal processes that lead to human eye diseases. To this end, we study eye development in zebrafish by various experimental approaches.

The research interests of our lab are currently focused in two directions. First, we hope to identify components of the gene regulatory network that regulate zebrafish eye development by gene expression profiling. Gene expression levels in microdissected eye tissues including retina, retinal pigment epithelium, and lens from wild-type and eye mutant embryos at different stages of development are being measured by microarray analysis or next generation sequencing. Novel statistical and bioinformatic analyses are being built for the identification of the relevant gene regulatory network and gene families.

Second, we hope to investigate the connectivity of these candidate genes to elucidate the subcircuits of the gene regulatory network, as well as the relationship of the subcircuits to the eye developmental processes. The subcircuits are being identified by methodologies including Chromatin Immunopreciptation (Chip) – microarrays and/or sequencing analyses (Chip-Chip or Chip-Seq). The identified subcircuits including signal transduction pathways, transcription factor and cell cycle regulator families will be characterized by various genetic, biochemical, molecular, cellular and histological techniques.