BNMC Seminar:  Regulatory Genomics of Sea Urchins

R. Andrew Cameron
Director, Center for Computational Regulatory Genomics
Beckman Institute
Caltech

The developing sea urchin embryo can be thought of as a bunch of outwardly indistinguishable cells that are busy mounting different programs of gene expression which define the territories that will make up the larva.  Thus, the study of development is the study of embryonic gene regulation.  This point has been brought home in recent studies that have described the gene regulatory network that leads to the specification of the endomesoderm territory in the sea urchin blastula.  Some 60 different regulatory genes are assembled into this network and they explain the intercellular signals and autonomous expression events known to occur in this embryo.  The gene activities in this network are linked through the cis-regulatory modules of the genome, the hard-wired inherited information in the genome.  With the advent of a draft genomic sequence for the sea urchin, opportunities are emerging for accelerating the discovery of network interactions and fully describing how development works in this outwardly simple embryo.