This laboratory is involved in several projects that focus attention on specific gene products and their roles in an organism's development and function. Models being used range from the vertebrate eye to the gut of the larval mosquito. The functioning products of most genes are proteins that control chemical reactions crucial to life processes. This laboratory investigates a number of very specific proteins and their roles and regulation during an organism's life. Current Projects One project in our lab involves isolating, characterizing and cloning the genes for key enzymes that participate in larval mosquito digestion and growth.
Carbon dioxide is a gaseous waste product of normal energy metabolism.
All organisms rapidly convert the gas into an ion so that it can be kept in solution in fluids and eventually eliminated. It is our current hypothesis that this type of enzyme will be a central player in the gut metabolism in mosquitoes. Mosquito larvae employ an extremely alkaline pH to initiate food digestion. This high pH is likely buffered with bicarbonate ions, the product of carbonic anhydrase activity. In the past year we successfully cloned a carbonic anhydrase gene from the mosquito larva gut and are now analyzing its expression and distribution in the tissue.