It has been nearly halfway through my Howard Hughes journey and I am still amazed every single day at what I learn about these small creatures and their developmental process.
The Sherwood lab focus is on the development of the vulva in C elegans. The extended process involves an crucial step called anchor cell invasion. The anchor cell is an one-of-a-kind cell whose role is to form a hole in the gonadal basement membrane to prepare for vulval morphogenesis later in development. This process closely resembles the cell invasion that happens in other contexts such as that used by cancer cells to enter the bloodstream. Understanding the genetics behind the anchor cell invasion can hopefully help us to better comprehend cancer.
My personal project involves the screening of C elegans mutants that have defects in anchor cell invasion and identification of the gene mutations responsible for those defects by comparing to known mutations. Some of the defects I observe include the cheese phenotype where multiple holes are formed on the basement membrane and the full block, where the basement membrane is not pierced by the anchor cell. To identify unknown mutations, I did crosses between those mutant with worms with known similar mutations and by observing the offspring ratio, I can learn whether the two mutations are the same or whether they are on the same chromosomes. At the moment, I am still in the process of screening and counting the F2 worms to calculate the ratio. Answers await…
