Harrison, Douglas A

Harrison Lab Research - Introduction

The complex choreography of cell proliferation, differentiation, rearrangement, and death is at the core of development of multicellular organisms. Coordination of these cellular activities requires extensive communication between cells. The long-term goal of the lab is to better understand how cellular signaling is used to direct activities that sculpt the multicellular organism. The Janus kinase/Signal transducer and activator of transcription (JAK/STAT) pathway is one of a small number of highly pleiotropic, evolutionarily conserved cascades that directs animal development. We study the mechanisms by which JAK/STAT signaling regulates development in the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model for developmental cell signaling in general.

RNAseq analysis for transcriptional profiling

This project seeks to determine the differences in gene expression between testes with normal vs. impaired JAK/STAT signaling. The DLX cluster will be used to map RNAseq reads.

Students:

Graduate Students – Sepideh Dadkhah, Michelle Giedt

Undergraduate - Zachary King

Nishtha Nayyar, PostDoc, Added on MCC cluster 07/11/2023 

Software:

Programs used include RSEM (RNA-Seq by Expectation-Maximization), custom perl scripts and sequence aligners (blast, bowtie, trinity).

Collaborators:

PI – Doug Harrison

Jeramiah Smith (UK)

Melissa Keinath (UK)

Cheol Joo Park, Seoul National University