Jason Gallant
Michigan State University, MI·Ecology & Evolution
Nearly every animal's sperm swims using a whip-like tail called a flagellum, a structure conserved across evolution. Mormyrids, a group of more than 200 species of weakly electric African fishes, are the only known vertebrates whose sperm lack flagella entirely.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Genetics
Biology
- Topics
mormyrids
weakly electric fish
sperm flagella
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Test whether a partial deletion found in mormyrids in a conserved flagella and cilia gene causes loss of sperm flagella, by recreating it in zebrafish with CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing.
- Determine the pleiotropic effects of this mutation on other ciliated cell types in mutant zebrafish, revealing how cilia-dependent systems are affected.
- Examine sperm-egg interaction in mormyrid fishes, including a newly discovered egg feature that may aid fertilization by sperm without flagella.
- Test evolutionary explanations for flagella loss, including evidence of sperm competition and the hypothesis of selection for energetically efficient testes.
More about the research
They are also known for producing and sensing electric signals and for unusually large brains. Understanding how such a basic trait was lost links a genetic change to the evolutionary forces acting on it, and may shed light on human diseases of cilia, the hair-like cell structures related to flagella.
Why it matters
Learning what happens when a key flagella and cilia gene is disrupted could give new insight into primary ciliary dyskinesia, a human disease of faulty cilia, and may point toward new therapeutic ideas. The work also explains how an unusual vertebrate mating system evolved, and keeps a public genomics resource available to electric fish researchers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kimberly Cooper
University of California-San Diego, CA·Genetics
Identify genetic controls of vertebral elongation that drive differences in tail length, by comparing tail development in laboratory mice and bipedal jerboas.
Brian Hermann
University of Texas at San Antonio, TX·Biology
Identify small molecules that bind RBM46, the germ-cell-specific RNA-binding protein required for sperm production, through drug screening, and advance the best binders as starting points for targeted degraders.
Ross Collery
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Neuroscience
Identify the signaling pathways and genes whose activity depends on STRA6 in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), by inactivating STRA6 and its partner RBP4 with CRISPR/Cas9 in zebrafish and in cultured human RPE cells.
The school
Michigan State University: 28 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 555 research doctorates a year.
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