The expanding CRISPER-Cas universe continues to provide new tools for manipulating genomes in animals.

James “Jamie” Gagnon who currently holds the Mario Capecchi Endowed Chair at the School of Biological Sciences understands that embryonic cells “talk” to each other to coordinate the construction process.

“Cells are master linguists – they use dozens of different languages, known as cell signaling pathways, to share information across the embryo,” says Gagnon. “Sometimes cells speak multiple languages simultaneously; sometimes they switch languages. During development, cells are also dividing and moving around the embryo.”  It’s nothing less than a cellular colloquium how humans and other vertebrates develop from a single fertilized egg into adults with trillions of cells.

Deciphering the blueprint for this complex and dynamic construction project is aided by certain genetic editing tools that new research continues to fine-tune and expand to better “listen” to the languages of the embryo recorded into DNA.

“We can recover these records to understand the construction of an adult animal,” says Gagnon, who with several co-authors recently detailed in the journal Genetics the continual exploration and application of emerging genome editing tools in zebrafish.

Why the humble zebrafish? “The power of genetics,” reported Gagnon in a recent profile of his work, “is that zebrafish are now genetically accessible model of all vertebrates, including humans which share 70 percent of genes with fish.” The tiny zebrafish thus offers immense practical advantages over nearly all other vertebrate model organisms as a testbed for genome engineering.

The Genetics article on the expansion of CRISPR-Cas tools titled “Orthogonal CRISPR-Cas tools for genome editing, inhibition, and CRISPR recording in zebrafish embryos” published this month and was largely spearheaded by an undergraduate in the Gagnon lab, Paige R Takasugi. Listed as the first author of the paper, “Paige was one of the first researchers in my lab when I arrived at the U and was referred to me by [another SBS professor] Michael Bastiani. She brainstormed the whole thing.” 

Now an MD/PhD Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Takasugi, an Idaho native, “built the foundation of the [Gagnon] lab” as a sophomore, says Gagnon. Another co-author who played a critical role early on was Evan Drage who arrived in 2018 and was originally a volunteer in the Martin Horvath lab. Drage became the full-time lab tech at the Gagnon lab.