Dysferlin-Deficient Sea Urchin Embryos
Objective:
Use dysferlin morpholinos to "knock-out" the sea urchin homologue to dysferlin and thus influence either the repair of plasma-membrane disruptions and/or membrane fusion events.
Sea urchin embryos are a convenient animal model to study cellular processes. Sea urchins have a ferlin gene very similar to dysferlin, which this project has "knocked out" by morpholinos. Using laser wounding to study ferlin-deficient embryos (at the four cell stage), we find that the wounded cell is able to repair its cell membrane, but signaling between adjacent cells is altered. This suggests that dysferlin may have a signaling role in muscle.
