The community site for and by
developmental and stem cell biologists

Juan R Martinez-Morales

Posts by Juan R Martinez-Morales

Postdoctoral position in comparative tissue morphogenesis @ Martinez-Morales lab.

Posted by , on 17 December 2019

Postdoctoral position. Centro Andaluz de Biología del Desarrollo (CABD), Seville. Juan R. Martinez-Morales Lab (jrmarmor@upo.es) is recruiting competitive postdoctoral researchers to participate in an interdisciplinary project on comparative tissue morphogenesis ...

PhD position in computational morphogenesis

Posted by , on 15 October 2018

We invite students to apply for a PhD position in computational morphogenesis at the Gene Expression and Morphogenesis Unit (http://cellcollectives.com/) at the Andalusian Centre for Developmental Biology (http://www.cabd.es), in the ...

Medaka fish sheds light on the evolutionary origin of vertebrate pair appendages

Posted by , on 23 April 2018

Link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0080-5   The evolutionary history of vertebrate appendages Have you ever wondered how our hands and feet evolved? This question, which commonly evokes fish crawling from ...

Postdoctoral candidates in cell and developmental biology at the gene regulation and morphogenesis department

Posted by , on 29 October 2015

In the frame of the 2016 “Juan de la Cierva” Call, a postdoctoral research post is available in Juan R. Martinez-Morales laboratory. (www.cabd.es). CABD (UPO/CSIC). National Research Council. Seville. Spain. ...

Recent jobs by Juan R Martinez-Morales

Post-doctoral opening at CABD-Seville

Posted by , on 16 June 2021

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position in Juan R. Martinez-Morales’ Laboratory. Control of Epithelial Morphogenesis in Vertebrates.   Requirements: We are seeking for a postdoctoral researcher with experience in bioinformatics/ computational tools applied to NGS (RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, scRNAseq, or Ribo-seq). Additional wet-lab training in developmental biology, with zebrafish as model organism, as well as […]

Recent comments by Juan R Martinez-Morales

In our local fish community at the CABD we are currently using both morpholinos and now CRISPr approaches. Recently, we have discussed the paper published in Developmental Cell by Kok et. al. (Lawson’s group), which concerns the poor correlation between mutant and MO-induced phenotypes. All the people participating in the journal club agreed on the general consensus of MO-based studies potentially leading to “false positives”, and the discussion “Mutants vs Morphants” proceeded along the same lines of Asilomar’s discussion (see Jon Moulton post above). However I would like to comment here on a particular aspect of this issue that I think may be important. That is, the unclear molecular nature of the MOs off-target effects. Are these off-target effects due to interference with specific off-target genes? If this were the case, a broad range of “fake phenotypes” should be expected as the off-target effects would depend on the specific sequence of the MO injected. In an alternative hypothesis, off-target effects may derive from sequence-independent interference with general gene expression mechanisms (either RNA-dependent or not). I personally feel that the list of the “fake” MOs-induced phenotypes described in Kok’s paper (i.e. ISV stalling, gastrulation defects, short axis, curved trunk, heart edema, necrosis, etc.) does not represents the full spectrum of the MO-induced phenotypes described in the literature. This observation supports the notion of a sequence-independent false positive effect. As an example, very little is known about the mechanism by which MOs induce p53 activation. These global effects on translation, splicing, etc., which is indeed discussed in Kok’s paper, may have important consequences on the evaluation of the specificity of a MO-induced phenotype. Whereas certain phenotypes may be frequently induced by MO injection (i.e. short axis, heart edema, stalled ISV, etc.), suggesting an off-target effect, other “unusual” phenotypes may serve as an indication of gene-specific interference (provided that all the necessary controls are also included in the study, of course).
by jrmarmor in Out with the old, in with the new: reassessing morpholino knockdowns in light of genome editing technology on February 12, 2015