Victoria A. Sleight

The paper generates and validates F0 CRISPR-Cas9 pax6 knockout mutants in the gastropod Crepidula fornicata without an assembled genome, showing eye-loss phenotype and confirming edits via Sanger sequencing and ICE analysis.

The paper traces the embryonic origin of calcitonin-producing cells across vertebrates and finds they derive from pharyngeal endoderm, not neural crest, and identifies homologues in invertebrate chordates.

This study shows that ectodermal Wnt signalling restricts Shh signal transduction and chondrogenesis to the posterior gill arch environment in skates, establishing skeletal polarity.

The paper identifies conserved and unique transcriptional features in pharyngeal arches of skates, supporting serial homology of jaw and gill arches while highlighting distinct developmental mechanisms.

The paper introduces ACME, a cell fixation-dissociation method for single-cell transcriptomics that preserves RNA integrity and enables cryopreservation and sorting, validated with SPLiT-seq in planarians.

This study uses cell lineage tracing in skates to investigate the embryonic origins of gill arches and paired fins, finding dual origins for gill arches and proposing serial homology between these structures.