Novel tools for disrupting gene function in the developing chicken embryo

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The chicken is an economically important food animal for humans and the chicken embryo has long been an important model system for developmental biologists. Our overall goal is to understand the regulatory genetic pathways that control the growth and development of the skeleton. This proposal is directed towards building novel vectors to better control our ability to manipulate gene function during chicken embryo development. In particular, since strategies to knock down gene function in the chick embryo in ovo are not yet widely used, we propose to construct and validate retroviral plasmids for tissue-specific delivery of small RNAs that disrupt key regulators of cartilage maturation in order to better understand their roles in skeletal development. Our initial focus will be on a family of transcriptional regulators called Dlx proteins in order to understand to what extent these genes are functionally redundant in the cartilage-derived skeleton.