Thursday 17 December 2015 at 10:00am

Title: “Zebrafish as a model for teleost and tetrapod immunity”

Speaker:
Dr. Jeffrey Yoder, North Carolina State University

Abstract:
The zebrafish is a powerful genetic system for understanding the molecular basis of disease. As a model organism, the zebrafish provides transparent embryos, a complete reference genome, and well-established procedures for genome engineering. The Yoder lab capitalizes on these advantages to identify and characterize novel mediators of innate immunity. One area of research focuses on multiple highly-diverged, rapidly-evolving multigene families of innate immune receptors that are specific to fish. As these genes likely play essential roles in fish health, the high level of gene content variation observed within these multigene families may have profound implications for intraspecific fitness. A second area of interest has emerged from a novel transcriptome profiling screen for zebrafish immune-responsive genes. This strategy has uncovered highly-conserved genes, not previously implicated in immune function, that regulate innate immune cell behavior in both fish and mammalian models. These investigations are revealing critical genes and gene families relevant to innate immunity across vertebrates.

Host: Dr. Russell Hill, Ph.D.