Jennifer’s thesis work on heterotrimeric G proteins in planarians has just gone up at Genetics. You can check out her work HERE. It’s a wonderful paper full of lots of great observations and tempting new questions!
Preprints from the R-G lab!
Congratulations to Tulip, Taylor, and Kendall. Tulip’s preprint on glial biology in planarians was preprinted at bioRxiv and is currently under review. Taylor and Kendall also coauthored a paper with me on transcriptional regulators of regeneration; our preprint is also up at bioRxiv and under review. We’re excited about the new science we’re sharing with the world and welcome any feedback you may have!
Liver Party!
Rachel traveled to Bluffton, GA to White Oak Pastures to pick up a healthy beef liver for us to process into puree and chunks for our planarians to eat. Lab members worked together to process and aliquot the liver. I appreciate all of the hard work that they put into liver prep (and trying to have fun while they work!).
Congratulations to Jennifer!
Today we congratulate Jennifer Jenkins on acceptance of her first first-author paper, in the journal Genetics. We’ll share the final version of the manuscript when it’s available, but for now, hooray to Jen for her hard work exploring heterotrimeric G proteins in planarian regeneration and behavior. It was a lot of work and it’s a project we’re both super proud of!
Jennifer showing peace signs in front of the computer after hitting the (re)submit button.
Jennifer and Rachel with thumbs up. This revision was a lot of work and I’m so proud of the final product!
2022 Highlights!
We got a LOT of great work done in 2022 and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on our collective progress in the past year. I was going to make it a top 10 list, but we did a lot, so there are more than 10 things listed here. Here are some highlights (in no particular order):
The lab received its first R01 from NINDS (NIH). It will fund our work on neurogenesis and nervous system repair in planarian regeneration.
Kendall and Taylor passed their qualifying exams with flying colors.
Jen submitted and preprinted her paper on heterotrimeric G proteins, which was reviewed and will be resubmitted very soon!
We worked on several other forthcoming manuscripts, including Tulip’s paper on planarian glia (in collaboration with the Davies lab).
Lab members attended several meetings: Regional SDB (Worm Squad), SDB (Jen and Rachel), ASCB (Rachel), Gordon Conference on Neural Dev (Kendall), CSHL Glia (Tulip), and a Cell Symposium on Stem Cell Biology (Andres). We also attended and presented at local symposia and retreats with our communities at UGA focused on undergraduate research, developmental biology, neuroscience, cellular biology, and regeneration.
We continued the Flatworm Fridays series in the spring, participating, presenting, and hearing lots of good work from our community.
We hosted 5 rotation students and recruited 2 new Ph.D. students — Skylar and Christina! Kendall and Taylor hosted ILS students and did a great job.
We were joined by technician Chris and returning undergrad lab member James.
We hosted high school trainee Ariel and NSURE student Jazmine, both of whom did a fantastic job in the lab!
Kendall applied for and was awarded a 2nd year of funding from our Genetics T32 training grant.
Andres was awarded a Pecot Fellowship from the McKnight Foundation. He is the first UGA recipient of this fellowship!
Trainees submitted funding applications that are under review: Andres’s GRFP and Ford applications and Kendall’s F31 application.
Lab alum Rachel Grimes graduated and headed off to medical school.
Rachel taught Advanced Developmental Biology and Cellular Biology, as well as a new GRADFirst class. Lab students did a fantastic job TAing classes that included CBIO (Tulip and Jen) and Anatomy and Physiology (Taylor).
We continued to support and encourage each other so that we can do the best science we can and be our best, healthiest, and happiest selves!