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TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Laboratory Methods to Culture and Manipulate Cnidarian Animals

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Guest Editor

Meng Zhu

Meng Zhu

Harvard Medical School, Department of Genetics

Dr. Meng Zhu obtained her bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences (Hons) from Tsinghua University in 2014. She then carried out her PhD research at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, where she worked in Prof. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz's lab to study the mechanisms to establish cell polarisation and cell fate in the early mouse embryo. During her PhD and a transitory postdoctoral researcher period in Cambridge, Meng Zhu developed the research interest based on cellular plasticity during tissue morphogenesis and cell fate differentiation, and the regulation of developmental timing. After leaving Cambridge, she continued her research in developmental biology as a Human Frontier Science Program–funded postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Cliff Tabin’s lab, in the Genetics Department at Harvard University. Her current research focuses on the causes and consequences of developmental heterochrony of limb development during evolution.

Collection Overview

Cnidarians are mostly marine invertebrates. During their life cycle, they switch between a sexually immature sessile polyp stage and a sexually matured swimming medusae stage. There is over a thousand cindarian species displaying many unique morphogenetic and behavioural features, which have made them fascinating systems to address a variety of developmental and evolutionary questions. To number just a few, their unique radial symmetrical body structures are ideal to study body plan evolution; both poylps and medusae forms have the ability to regenerate the lost tissues, which is complementary to vertebrate models to study whole-body regeneration. Cindarians have a simple nervous system architecture which eases the study of functions of neuronal cell types and evolution and the lack of senescence phenotype of polyps are unique to study aging processes.As non-standard model systems, the cellular-level studies of cnidarians heavily rely on the development and optimisation of protocols to culture and manipulate these animals. This collection aims to bring together the protocols that have been used for both the standardised methods to culture cnidarians and the newly developed cutting-edge technologies to visualise and functionally perturb developmental processes.

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Identification of Hemolytic and Phospholipase Activity in Crude Extracts from Sea Anemones by Straightforward Bioassays
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Identification of Hemolytic and Phospholipase Activity in Crude Extracts from Sea Anemones by Straightforward Bioassays

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2022

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