Embryonic Immunostaining for the Tardigrade .

Immunostaining is a method used to visualize the localization of proteins in fixed tissue. Many antibodies are available that recognize specific proteins in a wide diversity of organisms, which makes this method ideal for investigating gene expression patterns in nonmodel animal systems. This protocol describes immunostaining for studies of embryogenesis in the tardigrade .

Tissue-specific genetic control of splicing: implications for the study of complex traits.

Numerous genome-wide screens for polymorphisms that influence gene expression have provided key insights into the genetic control of transcription. Despite this work, the relevance of specific polymorphisms to in vivo expression and splicing remains unclear. We carried out the first genome-wide screen, to our knowledge, for SNPs that associate with alternative splicing and gene expression in human primary cells, evaluating 93 autopsy-collected cortical brain tissue samples with no defined neuropsychiatric condition and 80 peripheral blood mononucleated cell samples collected from living healthy donors.

The tardigrade Hypsibius dujardini, a new model for studying the evolution of development.

Studying development in diverse taxa can address a central issue in evolutionary biology: how morphological diversity arises through the evolution of developmental mechanisms. Two of the best-studied developmental model organisms, the arthropod Drosophila and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, have been found to belong to a single protostome superclade, the Ecdysozoa. This finding suggests that a closely related ecdysozoan phylum could serve as a valuable model for studying how developmental mechanisms evolve in ways that can produce diverse body plans.

Segmental expression of Pax3/7 and engrailed homologs in tardigrade development.

How morphological diversity arises through evolution of gene sequence is a major question in biology. In Drosophila, the genetic basis for body patterning and morphological segmentation has been studied intensively. It is clear that some of the genes in the Drosophila segmentation program are functioning similarly in certain other taxa, although many questions remain about when these gene functions arose and which taxa use these genes similarly to establish diverse body plans.

C. elegans PAR proteins function by mobilizing and stabilizing asymmetrically localized protein complexes.

Background: The PAR proteins are part of an ancient and widely conserved machinery for polarizing cells during animal development. Here we use a combination of genetics and live imaging methods in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans to dissect the cellular mechanisms by which PAR proteins polarize cells.

Results: We demonstrate two distinct mechanisms by which PAR proteins polarize the C.