Tubulin Beta-III, a protein with known roles in guiding and aligning nerve cells during development, may also contribute to the foundations of the whole nervous system, according to research by Jose Chacon, an undergraduate student working with CSUN Assistant Professor of Biology Crystal Rogers. Chacon’s work was published in the journal Gene Expression Patterns earlier this year.
The new paper tracks the expression of Tubulin Beta-III in the neural crest, a population of cells in the early embryo that eventually differentiate into a wide variety of specialized cell types, including multiple elements of the nervous system.
Chacon, the first undergraduate to publish work from the Rogers Lab, is a BUILD Poder scholar at CSUN and had an Amgen fellowship over this past summer to do research in the Bronner Lab at the California Institute of Technology.
Image: Figure 2 from Chacon and Rogers (2019), presenting immunohistochemistry staining to track the expression of Tubulin Beta-III in the neural plate