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   Hello!   

Welcome to the official blog of the Sauka-Spengler lab, also known as the TSS lab!  We are a scientifically diverse group based at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford. 

A significant part of our research focuses on understanding the genetic mechanisms that underlie early neural crest formation in vertebrate embryos.  The neural crest is an important stem-cell like population of cells that arise at a specific stage of development in the embryo which gives rise to a multitude of tissues and organs such as sensory neurons, the craniofacial skeleton, pigment cells of the skin and smooth muscle of major blood vessels.  Understanding how the neural crest is able to do this will one day contribute to the development and refinement of stem cell-based technologies.

 

The main obstacle to studying the neural crest is that these cells are buried within thousands of other cells in the embryo.  Hence, we have developed a useful genetic tool to isolate pure populations of neural crest cells in the zebrafish and chick.  This tool is now being used within our lab to also study other biological systems and processes such as blood development, the inflammatory response to injury and cancer, as well as organ regeneration.

TSS lab with summer students of 2014

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