The Kirby Lab
Neonatal Perinatal Research Institute
HOME PEOPLE EVENTS LINKS LIBRARY PHOTOS


Marzena Zdanowicz, D.V.M.
Research Assistant


        


I enjoy working with students to develop experiments that explore
heart development at the gene, cell, tissue and animal level.
Particularly, I am involved in maintaining our zebrafish facility,
ablation of cardiac neural crest in chick and zebrafish
embryos, single cell injections in zebrafish embryos, and tracing
and charactering cardiac neural crest cells. I am helping to establish
transgenic zebrafish lines in which the cardiac neural crest and
conotruncal myocardium are specifically marked. By crossing these
transgenic lines with mutant fish lines such as miles apart or ace
which carry mutated Edg5 and Fgf8 respectively, I hope to learn
more about the cellular and signal transduction pathways that
guide heart development.




Recent publications

Waldo KL, Zdanowicz M, and Kirby ML 2001 Myocardial changes after
neural crest ablation. (submitted, 2001).

Li Y-X, Zdanowicz M, Young L, Kumiski D, Leatherbury L, Kirby ML 2002
Cardiac neural crest in zebrafish embryos contributes to
myocardial cell lineage and early heart function. (submitted)

Chatterjee B, Li Y-X, Zdanowicz M, Sonntag JM, Chin AJ, Kozolowski DJ,
Valdimarsson G, Kirby ML, Lo CW. 2001 Analysis of Cx43a1 promoter function
in the developing zebrafish embryo. Cell Adhes Commun 8(4-6):289-292

Waldo KL, Zdanowicz M, Burch JL, Kumiski DH, Stadt HA, Godt RE, Creazzo TL,
and Kirby ML 1999 A novel role for cardiac neural crest in heart development.
J Clin Invest 103:1499-1507.


Favorite data




    



Ablation of cardiac neural crest causes defective heart looping
in zebrafish embryos. This figure shows sham-operated (top row)
and neural crest-ablated (bottom row) embryos (24 hpf) in whole
mount after MF20 (myocardial) staining. The embryos shown in
the frontal view are different from those shown from the right
and left sides which were viewed by confocal microscopy. The atrial
and ventricular chambers are superimposed in the sham-operated
embryos, while the chambers are not superimposed in the ablated embryos.