Check out or new collaborative manuscript where we looked at small RNA content of extracellular vessicles from mouse trophoblast stem cells (TSC) and TSC differentiated into parietal trophoblast giant cells (pTGC). We also looked at how exposure of mouse neural progenitor cells (NPC) to EV from either TSC or pTGC affect their transcriptome profiles. This exciting work is a first step towards understanding how placenta-derived extracellular vessicles may provide direct support for fetal brain development and may be an integral part of the placenta-brain axis. This work was in collaboration with Dr. Rosenfeld and Dr. Roberts from the University of Missouri, Columbia. Also check out this article about Cheryl, her work, and this published work!

Check out our collaborative manuscript where a conditional rat model targeting the invasive trophoblast cell lineage was generated.  This is an excellent tool to study genes regulating invasive trophoblast cells in the placenta! This work was carried out in Dr. Soares group at KUMC.

Ha came back for graduation - congratulations again, Ha!

Ashwini Rangaraj won the 3MT competition at Iowa State University, which started with >80 students competing! Congratulations Ashwini!! She will be headed to St. Louis in April for the midwest competition.

Congratulations Ashwini Rangaraj whose abstract was selected for an oral presentation at the Greenwald Symposium! Ashwini gave an excellent talk about enhancer regulation in trophoblast cells. Congratulations also to Sabrena Rutledge, who presented a poster on her work and won the poster award!

Congratulations to Ha Vu, who successfully defended her thesis on August 22, 2023! She already has a position lined up as an Associate Lead Bioinformatician at the University of Michigan! Ha was an amazing student and will be missed greatly!!

Our collaborative manuscript was published in Development today! We worked with the Michael Soares group to integrate our previously published single-cell RNA-seq data generated in the rat uterine-placental interface with single-nucleus ATAC-seq data generated at the same stage and in the same tissue type. We identified chromatin accessibility profiles in different cell types and identified a conserved gene
regulatory network in invasive trophoblast cells. This work will will facilitate future studies investigating regulatory mechanisms in the invasive trophoblast cell lineage.

Our collaborative manuscript was published in Genome Research today! We worked with Yudi Zhang and Karin Dorman in the Statistics department on a novel peak caller that uses unsupervised contrastive learning to extract shared signals from multiple replicates. We focused on ATAC-seq data and demonstrated that our tool, replicative contrastive learner (RCL), outperformed other methods. Congrats all!

Ha Vu, a PhD student in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, has received a Research Excellence Award! This award recognizes graduate students for outstanding research accomplishments. Students receiving this award are thought to be academically superior, and the program recognizes only the best students that are nearing graduation. Congratulations, Ha!

Congratulations to both of our undergraduate students on receiving fellowships to do research in the lab this summer! Jordan Hansen received the Dean's High Impact Award for Undergraduate Research and the GDCB summer internship. Alexis Ball received the Sui Tong Chan Fung Fund Internship. Congratulations Alexis and Jordan - we are excited to have you in the lab for the summer!