The Cardiac Positioning System – how do heart progenitors find their way? (MUNSTERBERG_U27DTP)
The first organ to develop in vertebrate embryos is the heart, when two streams of cardiac progenitor cells undertake an epic migration before reuniting at the heart field – the site of future heart formation. How do cardiac progenitors achieve this feat? What clues guide them along the way and how do they “read” them?
In this exciting PhD project, you will use live cell imaging to track migration of cardiac progenitor cells as they navigate towards the embryonic heart field. You will learn molecular functional approaches to identify the cellular apparatus used by these remarkable cells to interpret a complex cell signalling landscape.
Experimentally, you will gain skills in molecular biology to clone candidate genes for mis-expression, or knock them down using CRISPR/Cas9 approaches in migrating cardiac progenitors and map their perturbed migration trajectories. This will reveal how specific gene products influence cell migration and fate decisions during heart formation.
You will join a collaborative supervisory team at UEA (Andrea Münsterberg, Tim Grocott, James Mccoll), gaining skills in developmental biology, molecular genetics, live imaging/microscopy, and computational biology. This multi-disciplinary project offers the opportunity to make fundamental discoveries about the molecular control of heart development.
Contact a.munsterberg@uea.ac.uk or t.grocott@uea.ac.uk for more information.