Overview

My research project encompasses development and application of technologies for the interrogation of developmental mechanism at the proteomic level. I work with early stage embryos from frog and fish and with neurons extracted from mice pups. This can ultimately allow us to answer fundamental questions about the onset of developmental impairments and onset of congenital diseases.

Project #1: Developing new technologies for single cell analysis

This project focuses mostly on developing new technologies and workflows for the untargeted proteomic analysis of single cells (so far embryonic cells). To this end I built a CE-nESI-MS/MS platform enabling analysis of nL of cellular extract leading to the identification of hundreds of proteins in a single shot.
This technique combined with tandem mass tags allowed us to identify proteomic differences in different cell types in the 16-cell stage Xenopus laevis embryo.

Project #2: Finding the onsets of dystroglycanopathy

For this project, we utilize commercially available and custom built platforms to identify and quantify: proteins, glycan and glycopeptides, from different tisues of zebrafish larvae and mice pups’ neurons.