Kuraku Group / Molecular Life History Laboratory

Shark and ray genomics for disentangling their morphological diversity and vertebrate evolution

Shigehiro Kuraku

Developmental Biology 477 262-272 (2021) DOI:10.1016/j.ydbio.2021.06.001

Developmental studies of sharks and rays (elasmobranchs) have provided much insight into the process of morphological evolution of vertebrates. Although those studies are supposedly fueled by large-scale molecular sequencing information, whole-genome sequences of sharks and rays were made available only recently. One compelling difficulty of elasmobranch developmental biology is the low accessibility to embryonic study materials and their slow development. Another limiting factor is the relatively large size of their genomes. Moreover, their large body sizes restrict sustainable captive breeding, while their high body fluid osmolarity prevents reproducible cell culturing for in vitro experimentation, which has also limited our knowledge of their chromosomal organization for validation of genome sequencing products. This article focuses on egg-laying elasmobranch species used in developmental biology and provides an overview of the characteristics of the shark and ray genomes revealed to date.

Kanemaki Group / Molecular Cell Engineering Laboratory

Targeted Protein Depletion Using the Auxin-Inducible Degron 2 (AID2) System

Yuichiro Saito, Masato T. Kanemaki

Current Protocols 1, e219 (2021) DOI:10.1002/cpz1.219

We published an improved auxin-inducible degron system, namely AID2, last year (Research Highlights). For researchers who wish to establish a human degron cell line, we wrote a protocol paper describing detailed methodologies. We show our protocol for tagging an endogenous gene using CRISPR-Cas9 for establishing a cell line that expresses a degron-fused protein.

NIG will be closed from August 16 to August 17, 2021 for summer holiday. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.