Visitor from University of Oregon

Dr. Hao Song from the Department of Biology, University of Oregon, is going to visit our lab on September 28, 2010. He will give a seminar titled "Hematopoietic cell lineage switching mediated by zebrafish Stat1b" in the conference room 378, Research Building, at 10:30 AM. You are more than welcome to attend the seminar and share ideas with him.

Here is the abstract: "The mechanisms that regulate lineage fate selection during hematopoiesis are as yet not fully known. Here we report a second zebrafish co-ortholog of the human STAT1 gene we call stat1b. The stat1b gene is predicted to encode all four characteristic domains of STAT1 protein. Phylogenetic and conserved synteny analyses showed that stat1b and stat1a arose as duplicates in the teleost genome duplication event and clarify the historical origin of the entire vertebrate STAT gene family. RT-PCR demonstrated maternal expression of both stat1a and stat1b. Expression of stat1b, but not stat1a, was detected in hematopoietic domains of embryos by RNA in situ hybridization. Morpholino knockdown of stat1b, but not stat1a resulted in a decrease in expression of the myeloid cell marker genes spi and mpx and an increase in expression of the hematopoietic progenitor marker gene scl and the erythrocyte marker gene gata1. These results show that in zebrafish, Stat1b functions in the commitment of hematopoietic cells to a myeloid cell fate."