Project(s)

Faculty Profile

spletterlab.com


Research Description

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Animals have many different types of muscles that differ in their morphologies and contractile abilities. During development, muscle cells regulate gene expression and alternative splicing to fine-tune their contractile ability, and defects in this process lead to muscle disease. My lab is interested in understanding how RNA binding proteins, which regulate RNA processing, contribute to muscle-type specific development and function. We investigate this question in the powerful genetic model organism Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, which shares muscle structural components as well as the mechanism of contraction with vertebrate muscle. Flies use a special type of muscle, the flight muscles, to power flight. We focus on RNA regulation in these muscles, as they are easy to image and dissect, they are not essential so we can study muscles in mutant flies, and we are able to track RNA binding protein function from the molecular level to the cellular phenotype to the impact on behavioral performance. We employ a variety of techniques, including classic genetics, live imaging, confocal microscopy and immunohistochemistry, bioinformatics, mRNA-Seq, mass spectrometry, molecular biology and protein biochemistry.


Afflicated Department(s)

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Biology - General  Cell Biology & Biophysics  Molecular Biology&Biochemistry  


Faculty-related Tags
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Drosophila  RNA  alternative splicing  behavior  bioinformatics  development  gene expression  genetics  muscle  


First-generation college graduate
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no

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