Novel tools for disrupting gene function in the developing chicken embryo

鸡是人类重要的经济食用动物，鸡胚胎长期以来一直是发育生物学家的重要模式系统。我们的总体目标是了解控制骨骼生长和发育的调控遗传途径。这项建议旨在构建新的载体，以更好地控制我们在鸡胚胎发育过程中操纵基因功能的能力。特别是，由于在鸡蛋中敲除鸡胚胎基因功能的策略尚未得到广泛应用，我们建议构建并验证逆转录病毒载体，用于组织特异性地运送干扰软骨成熟关键调控因子的小RNA，以便更好地了解它们在骨骼发育中的作用。我们最初的重点将放在一个称为DLX蛋白的转录调节家族上，以了解这些基因在软骨来源的骨骼中在多大程度上是功能冗余的。

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.