Collaborative Research: EDGE FGT: In vivo and in vitro Tools for the Community of Echinoderm Researchers

Everything in biology is connected. Our job as life scientists is to reveal important biological properties in the most impactful, efficient, and economical way. To do so we look for model organisms that are particularly tractable for studying complex biological processes and then apply what we learn to better understand other organisms.

For more than a century, sea urchins have provided a valuable research model that has contributed significantly to our understanding of many fundamental biological processes such as fertilization, embryonic development, and cell division. Sea urchins have proven to be a valuable model due to their close genetic relationship to vertebrate animals and many features that make experimentation easier.

The goal of this proposal is to create the next generation of tools to enhance the utility of sea urchins as research models that will enable new areas of research and to make these tools widely available to the scientific community. Areas of biological research to be enhanced by the tools created from this proposal include a better understanding of how eggs and sperm interact at fertilization, understanding the rules of embryo development, how nerve cells are made, how sex is determined, how animals protect themselves from environmental insults and from infection, and how tissues and organs can regenerate when they are damaged.

The outcomes of this proposal will reach far beyond the scientists, to the public, students and teachers and make the sea urchin a highly attractive and impactful research and education tool of the twenty-first century.

Sea urchin researchers have long sought to leverage the experimental tractability of the embryo and adult with genetic approaches but, to date, manipulations have been limited largely to dependence on morpholinos or pharmacology. The overarching goal of this EDGE proposal is to build tools that overcome major obstacles to testing gene functionality in echinoderms, opening up a new era of discovery for diverse and integrated studies across all life history stages of this valuable sister group to chordates.

This goal will be realized as follows: (1) Simple and efficient protocols for culturing cells from embryos to investigate gene function in vitro; (2) Rapid, scalable DNA transfection of embryos, adult tissues, and cell cultures for conditional, and reversible gene control; (3) Techniques to promote standardization of sea urchin husbandry with open hardware and cryopreservation for sea urchin germplasm and cell lines; (4) Virtual, interactive educational materials to reach secondary school and undergraduate students and investigators learning from and even considering entering this research community. These integrated new technologies with controlled and heritable genetic manipulations and the ability to test gene function and regulation in in vitro cell-based systems will enable new avenues of investigation that fully exploit the important properties of echinoderms as a research organism.

The tools developed in this proposal will remove the bottlenecks and provide scalable and sustainable resources for the community of echinoderm researchers.

The proposal was funded by the Enabling Discovery through GEnomics (EDGE) program and the Developmental Systems Cluster in the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.