Rogers, Crystal D - California State University, Northridge

个人简介

Originally from the wine country in Northern California, I moved to Southern California in 1997 to attend UCLA. I received my B.S. in biology from UCLA in December of 2001. After I graduated I worked with J. Patrick Johnson at Cedars Sinai for a year and a half and then took a big leap and moved across the U.S. to attend graduate school at Georgetown University. I began graduate school in August of 2003 and quickly joined the lab of Elena Casey in the Department of Biology. I was in the Casey lab for five and a half years studying early neural development in the African claw-toed frog, Xenopus laevis. I received by PhD from Georgetown in 2009 and moved to my current position at the California Institute of Technology in January of 2010. I was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Marianne Bronner in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech from 2010-2015. Currently, I am an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at California State University, Northridge. I study the molecular mechanisms that drive neural crest cell development in chicken (Gallus gallus) and axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) embryos. More specifically, I am interested in identifying and characterizing genes and proteins involved in the specification of these tissues as well as those controlling the epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT), a process that occurs naturally during development and also during cancer transformation. Eventually, I hope to identify new proteins, and new roles for established proteins that regulate neural crest development. The Lab: I have recruited 8 fantastic undergraduate students, and we will have our first graduate student starting in Fall 2017! We are not currently adding students to the lab.

研究领域

Our lab is interested in early development in vertebrate embryos, specifically, we use chicken and amphibian embryos as our model organisms. We are interested in questions like: How do cells know what to become? How do cells know that they should stick together when other cells are leaving and migrating throughout the embryo? What makes cells unique? To answer these questions, we study the progenitor (stem cell-like) cells that make up the central (CNS) and peripheral nervous systems (PNS). The peripheral nervous system is created by cells that originally start out attached to the cells that will make up the brain and the spinal cord, but they receive a signal as the embryos develop that tells them to detach and leave the CNS and migrate through the embryo. We want to know what makes neural cells neural, and what makes the cells that leave the neural tube different. We are also interested in finding out why and how the cells that leave (neural crest cells) start migrating. The process where neural crest cells leave the neural tube is called the epithelial (adherent cells) to mesenchymal (loose cells) transition or EMT. We believe that the strict spatial and quantitative regulation of adhesion molecules during cranial neural crest EMT is regulated by a protein called Sip1, along with other EMT factors. My current research focuses on: 1) Characterizing the function of Sip1 during EMT and identifying novel targets and its cofactors. 2) Identifying the timing, function and regulation of the cadherin proteins during EMT. 3) Analyzing the effects of cadherin protein changes on cell cycle, proliferation and differentiation.

近期论文

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Sip1 mediates an E-cadherin-to-N-cadherin switch during cranial neural crest EMT. JCB. C.D. Rogers, A. Saxena, M.E. Bronner. December 2, 2013. doi: 10.1083/jcb.201305050 Elk3 is essential for the progression from progenitor to definitive neural crest cell. Dev Biol. C.D. Rogers, J.L. Phillips, M.E. Bronner. February 15, 2013. doi: 10.1016/j.ydbio.2012.12.009. The response of early neural genes to FGF signaling or inhibition of BMP indicate the absence of a conserved neural induction module. BMC Dev Biol. C.D. Rogers, G.S. Ferzli, E.S. Casey. December 15, 2011. doi:10.1186/1471-213X-11-74. Neural crest specification: tissues, signals, and transcription factors. WIREs Dev Biol. C.D. Rogers, C.S. Jayasena, S. Nie, M.E. Bronner. November 17, 2011. DOI: 10.1002/wdev.8. Neural induction and factors that stabilize a neural fate. Birth Defects Res C Embryo Today. C.D. Rogers, S.A. Moody, E.S. Casey. September 2009. DOI: 10.1002/bdrc.20157. Xenopus Sox3 activates sox2 and geminin and indirectly represses Xvent2 expression to induce neural progenitor formation at the expense of non-neural ectodermal derivatives. Mech of Dev. C.D. Rogers*, N. Harafuji*, T.C. Archer, D.D. Cunningham, E.S. Casey. January-February 2009. Sox3 expression is maintained by FGF signaling and restricted to the neural plate by Vent proteins in the Xenopus embryo. Dev Biol. C.D. Rogers*, T.C. Archer*, D.D. Cunningham, T.C. Grammer, E.M. Silva Casey. January 2008.