Goessling Lab North Lab

Wolfram Goessling MD, PhD Trista E. North PhD

Email: wgoessling@partners.com Email:trista.north@childrens.harvard.edu

Twitter : @WGoessling Twitter : @NorthTrista

Hepatobiliary Organogenesis - Dr. Wolfram Goessling

The liver functions as a central metabolic organ, integrating lipid, carbohydrate and protein homeostasis, detoxifying metabolic waste products and producing essential serum proteins. Acute and chronic liver injury can lead to inflammation, fibrosis, organ failure and ultimately cancer, such as hepatocellular carcinoma. The Goessling laboratory utilizes chemical and genetic methods in the zebrafish combined with high-resolution imaging and genomics approaches to dissect regulatory networks controlling hepatopancreatic cell differentiation and organ growth. We employ clinically relevant fish and mouse models of hepatic injury to achieve novel mechanistic insight into liver regeneration, fatty liver disease, alcoholic liver disease and liver cancer.

Developmental Hematopoiesis - Dr. Trista North

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) produce and maintain each of the blood lineages present during a vertebrate’s lifetime. Gene programs and signaling networks regulating HSC development and function are highly evolutionarily conserved, with disruption resulting in hematologic malignancy. HSCs are therapeutically valuable for the treatment of hematologic disease, but are in limited supply and currently cannot be effectively expanded or produced de novo in culture. The North laboratory utilizes molecular and chemical biology approaches in the zebrafish embryo to identify and characterize pathways regulating HSC specification, expansion and differentiation in vivo. To investigate regulatory conservation and potential translational application, we employ in vivo functional analyses in adult zebrafish and mice, and human in vitro hematopoietic culture.