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lab profile
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Tony De Tomaso UC Santa Barbara
Department of MCD Biology
UCSB
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
USA
detomaso@lifesci.ucsb.edu
805-893-7276
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| PI: |
YES |
| Taxa Studied: |
Invertebrate Animals |
| Techniques Employed: |
Quantitative PCR (qPCR), Microarrays, Sanger Sequencing, 454 Pyrosequencing, Solexa (Illumina) Sequencing, Bioinformatics/Sequence Analysis, QTL Mapping, In Situ Hybridization, Antibody Staining, Sectioning for Histology, Sectioning for Electron Microscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy, Epifluoresence Microscopy, Confocal Microscopy, Time-Lapse Microscopy, Transgenesis, RNA interference(RNAi) |
| Research Description: |
We are studying the colonial ascidian Botryllus schlosseri, an invertebrate chordate which grows by a process of asexual budding during which entire individuals are regenerated. This occurs on a weekly basis and we are trying to identify both the source of this ability, as well as dissecting the developmental pathways which underlie regeneration. We have developed the methodology to prospectively isolate stem cells by FACS which can give rise to both germline and somatic tissues upon transplantation. We are also creating monoclonal antibodies to different cell surface proteins for further enrichment. In addition, this organism has little genomic information and we are creating a large transcriptome database and have also recently initiated a large scale study to characterize the transcriptome during asexual development using Illumina sequencing. This will require development of a bioinformatics pipeline to actually use that data which we hope will be applicable to any organism. Finally, we are attempting to make transgenic organisms for lineage tracing studies using multiple techniques. |
| Lab Web Page: |
http://www.lifesci.ucsb.edu/mcdb/faculty/detomaso/ |
| Willing to Host Undergraduates: |
YES |
| Actively Seeking Undergraduates: |
YES |
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