Feds Back Probe of Understudied Gut Nervous System
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:
Feds back probe of understudied gut nervous system:
If you didn't realize you had an enteric nervous system[*], you're not alone.
[...] Uribe, who was recruited to Rice in 2017 with a CPRIT Scholar grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, specializes in studying the development of the enteric nervous system. When that development goes awry, it can lead to chronic and sometimes life-threatening illnesses, including neuroblastoma, a common pediatric cancer, and Hirschsprung disease, a congenital condition that frequently causes chronic intestinal obstructions and severe constipation.
We know an embarrassingly small amount of information about how the enteric nervous system forms," Uribe said. We have a long way to go to understand the fundamental mechanisms of how it forms, and that's the major goal of this R01."
It is impossible to directly study the development of the enteric nervous system in humans. For ethical reasons, human embryos cannot be studied beyond the 14th day after fertilization, which is well before most of the development of the enteric nervous system takes place. Instead, Uribe and her students use zebrafish, small egg-laying fish whose translucent embryos develop outside the female's body. Using a variety of microscopes and genetic tools, Uribe and her students can peer directly inside the embryos and make detailed observations of the neural crest cells, the embryonic stem cells that give rise to the enteric nervous system.
Journal Reference: Aubrey GA Howard IV, Phillip A Baker, Rodrigo Ibarra-Garcia-Padilla, et al. An atlas of neural crest lineages along the posterior developing zebrafish at single-cell resolution, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.60005)
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