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3258 TAMU Office: Lab: Fax: 979-845-2891 |
Biography |
| Dr. Lekven received his B.A. (1989) in Animal Physiology from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Lekven performed his graduate studies under the tutelage of Dr. Volker Hartenstein in the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology at UCLA where he studied the molecular genetics of neurogenesis in Drosophila melanogaster . After earning his Ph.D. in 1996, he began his studies of zebrafish developmental genetics as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Randall Moon in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Pharmacology at the University of Washington. He joined the Department of Biology at Texas A&M University in fall 2001. | |
| Vertebrate Mesoderm Induction and Patterning | |
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The goal of my laboratory is to understand in molecular terms how vertebrate embryonic patterning occurs. To approach this, we use the common aquarium fish, the zebrafish ( Danio rerio ). Zebrafish are an excellent model organism for several reasons: ease of obtaining embryos, their microscopy-friendly optical clarity, availability of mutant lines and excellent molecular genetic and genomics tools to name a few. Our current focus is on understanding how the medically important Wnt/ b -catenin signal transduction pathway regulates mesoderm formation and patterning. We are using molecular and genetic approaches to understand how Wnt signaling acts in combination with either BMP or FGF signaling to regulate specific aspects of early ventral mesoderm patterning. Of course, cell fates depend on the expression of specific combinations of genes-that is, their gene regulatory networks. We are using a variety of genomic and bioinformatic approaches to understand the ventral mesoderm gene network of which Wnt/ b -catenin signaling is a part. |
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| Selected Publications | |
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Marie-Christine Ramel, Gerri R. Buckles, Kevin Baker and Arne C. Lekven. (2005) Wnt8 and Bmp2b co-regulate non-axial mesoderm patterning in zebrafish. Developmental Biology 287, 237-248. Bryan T. Phillips, Elly M. Storch, Arne C. Lekven and Bruce B. Riley. (2004). A direct role for Fgf but not Wnt in otic placode induction. Development 131, 923-931. Ramel M. C., Buckles G. R., Lekven A. C. 2004. Conservation of structure and functional divergence of duplicated Wnt8s in pufferfish. Dev Dyn. 231:441-8. Ramel M. C., Lekven A. C. 2004. Repression of the vertebrate organizer by Wnt8 is mediated by Vent and Vox. Development. 131: 3991-4000. Buckles G. R., Thorpe C. J., Ramel M. C., Lekven A. C. 2004. Combinatorial Wnt control of zebrafish midbrain-hindbrain boundary formation. Mech Dev. 121:437-47. Lekven A. C., Buckles G. R., Kostakis N., Moon R. T. 2003. Wnt1 and wnt10b function redundantly at the zebrafish midbrain-hindbrain boundary. Dev Biol. 254: 172-87. Lekven, A. C., Thorpe, C. J., Waxman, J. S. and Moon, R. T. 2001. Zebrafish wnt8 Encodes Two Wnt8 Proteins on a Bicistronic Transcript and Is Required for Mesoderm and Neurectoderm Patterning. Developmental Cell 1:103-114. Lekven, A. C., Helde, K. A., Thorpe, C. J., Rooke, R. and Moon, R. T. 2000. Reverse genetics in zebrafish. Physiol. Genomics 2:37-48. |
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One of the most important events in vertebrate development is the formation of the mesoderm. This tissue layer is responsible for establishing a global coordinate system that the embryo uses to determine how cells become allocated to different fates, such as forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain, trunk muscle, tail muscle, kidney, blood, etc. -- a process referred to as patterning . Work from many vertebrate organisms has established that mesoderm formation and patterning is under the control of several conserved signal transduction cascades: specifically the Wnt, BMP, FGF and Nodal signaling pathways. The challenge now is to understand the molecular events downstream of these signals and how inputs from multiple signals are interpreted into specific cellular responses such as becoming a blood cell versus a kidney cell.