Tools and technology

In the Lawson Lab, we strive to develop and apply cutting edge technologies to address our questions of interest. Among our efforts include generation of the first zebrafish knockouts using programmable nucleases. Our subsequent large-scale efforts to apply this technology led us to discover major discrepancies between the use of antisense knockdown technologies (e.g. Morpholinos) and bona fide genetic approaches. We have also developed a collection of Gateway compatible plasmids for analyzing gene function in zebrafish, which are widely used in the community.  More recently, we have applied techniques, such as FANS-assisted ATAC-Seq, to dissect transcriptional regulation of vascular development.  In addition we use a variety of approaches amenable to zebrafish, including two-photon time-lapse microscopy, to directly visualize and manipulate blood vessel growth (for examples, see here and here).