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lab profile
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Maria Ina Arnone Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn
villa Comunale
Naples, Italy 80121
Italy
miarnone@szn.it
(+39) 081-5833203
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| PI: |
YES |
| Taxa Studied: |
Invertebrate Animals |
| Techniques Employed: |
Degenerate PCR, Quantitative PCR (qPCR), Sanger Sequencing, Bioinformatics/Sequence Analysis, In Situ Hybridization, Antibody Staining, Epifluoresence Microscopy, Confocal Microscopy, Transgenesis, Morpholinos, Mutagenesis |
| Research Description: |
The Stazione Zoologica (SZN) is devoted to research in marine and basic biology. The research at SZN is largely interdisciplinary and the Cellular and Developmental Biology dept focuses on the regulatory mechanisms that direct development of organisms. Within it, the Arnone lab utilizes the sea urchin and starfish embryos to study gene regulatory networks that underlay development of body parts. An important aspect of the sea urchin and starfish model systems, both fully accessible to functional analysis, is the phylogenetic position of these animals in the animal kingdom. Sea urchins and starfish are echinoderms. Echinoderms, together with the sister group hemichordates, are ancient lineages of living non-chordates deuterostomes. Therefore, they provide an invaluable outgroup for assessment of what is ancient in chordates, what is chordate-specific, what is protostome-specific and represent a key group for studying the origin of deuterostomes. The Arnone team currently focuses on the evolution of the mesoderm specification network, the role of the ParaHox genes in gut patterning, and the study of sensory cells in the sea urchin. The institute has excellent support services for molecular work, such as automated sequencing, high throughput robotic systems and real time qPCR, microscopy, marine animal resources, computer facilities, and a large technical workshop. |
| Lab Web Page: |
http://www.tinyurl.com/arnone-lab |
| Willing to Host Undergraduates: |
YES |
| Actively Seeking Undergraduates: |
NO |
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