Victor Ambros
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Genetics
Animal development runs on a schedule. Cells divide, specialize, and reshape tissues in a particular order and at particular times, and the result is remarkably consistent from one individual to the next — even though developing animals routinely face hunger, temperature swings, and other everyday stresses.
- Fields
Genetics
Biology
Biochemistry
- Topics
microRNA
developmental timing
heterochronic genes
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2030
What they work on
- Determine mechanistically how microRNAs, short noncoding RNAs that dampen other genes, work together with RNA-binding proteins to keep heterochronic gene network output accurate during C. elegans larval development.
- Exploit the conditional phenotypes of C. elegans microRNA mutants — defects that appear only under environmental or physiological stress — to identify which regulators confer stress resilience on cell-fate timing.
- Dissect how precisely timed changes in transcription factor levels, the proteins that specify stage-specific cell fates, are set by microRNAs and other post-transcriptional regulators in the heterochronic network.
- Characterize microRNA function during whole-body regeneration in the acoel worm Hofstenia miamia, testing whether ancient microRNA roles support robustness through abrupt shifts in gene expression, proliferation, and cell fate.
More about the research
How does a developmental program stay on schedule under conditions it cannot predict? This work investigates the gene regulatory networks that set developmental timing, with a focus on microRNAs: very short RNA molecules that do not code for proteins but instead tune down the output of other genes.
Why it matters
Knowing how small regulatory RNAs keep developmental timing accurate under stress addresses a basic question about why animal development is so reliable. Because microRNAs and RNA-binding proteins act in essentially all animals, mechanisms worked out in worms could eventually inform understanding of how gene regulation buffers development and tissue repair more broadly, including the regenerative capacity shared across animal lineages.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anna La Torre
University of California-Davis, CA·Neuroscience
Map how microRNA expression and the messenger RNAs they target change over time in cortical radial glial progenitors, using miR-eCLIP to capture miRNA–target pairs.
Michael D Sheets
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Biology
Define how Bicaudal-C (Bicc1), an RNA-binding protein, selects its target mRNAs, testing whether multiple independent RNA-binding surfaces in its binding domain determine specificity, using RNA-protein biochemistry and genome-wide approaches.
Sandeep Wontakal
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Genetics·Early-career
Identify the cis-regulatory elements, DNA control regions near the gene, that set when and where the long non-coding RNA lep-5 is expressed in C. elegans, using newly generated worm strains.
The school
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School: 29 labs on PI Pages, $350M a year on research, 55 research doctorates a year.
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