Our hypothesis is that horseshoe crabs posses many of the same genes to control emryonic development as insects and vertebrates. Our long term questions are which of these highly conserved genes are active in horseshoe crab embryos, when are thay active and how do they work. Right now, we are still looking for genes. Students working on this project are creating cDNA libraries from embryos and screening these libraries for genes of interest in a variety of ways. They also look for homologs of known genes using RNA isolated from embryos.
Funding is available for student researchers.