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ECB-PERS-5299
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Name: Glen M. Wickersham Garcia
Position: Graduate Student
Research Description:
The field of regenerative medicine and precision medicine aims to use growth factors, transcription factors, and other regulators to target specific cellular mechanism to regenerate tissues and organs. In humans, the ability to regenerate their nervous system is highly limited by many issues that are not yet fully understood. In contrast, other animal species have amazing regenerative capacities. H. glaberrima, like other echinoderms, has been shown to be a potential model to understand nervous system regeneration. One of the components we are exploring is the reinnervation of the regenerated intestinal tissue. Exploration of putative factors identified from regeneration transcriptomes has allowed the identification of several vertebrate orthologues. Using in silico methods, we were able to identify two different putative neurotrophic factors and at least one receptor from H. glaberrima transcriptomes. The encoded proteins, obtained from both neural and intestinal transcriptomes, show a high sequence similarity to members of the neurotrophin family and their receptors. Specific conserved regions for these genes were compared with other homologues from echinoderms and humans. Further studies of these genes could lead to the determination of their roles in regenerating tissue and their possible importance in the regeneration of the organs.