Thank you for visiting our laboratory web page. Here you will have the opportunity to learn about the people in the lab that do the great things that we publish. I’ve been very fortunate to assemble a team of great people that work well together. We also have world-wide collaborations that result in accomplishing goals that are unattainable in a single laboratory.

Our research is focused on early embryo development in the pig. There is a 30% loss of potential conceptuses during the first month of development. We hope that by describing the cellular and molecular program of events that occur during development of the preimplantation pig embryo the root causes of these losses can be identified and steps can be taken to reduce them. To that end we have conducted three EST projects--funded by USDA and Monsanto Company-(http://swine.rnet.missouri.edu/; http://bovine.rnet.missouri.edu/; http://genome.rnet.missouri.edu/Ovine/ )-with the final goal of transcript profiling of reproductive tissues in pigs and cattle. Now we are moving to the next generation of transcript profiling by deep sequencing.  Along the way we have developed technology to mature oocytes, to activate oocytes, to in vitro fertilize oocytes, to culture oocytes and embryos, and to perform embryo transfer.

Since we have expertise working with early embryo and somatic cell nuclear transfer, we have used this technology to produce genetically modified pigs both directly in his laboratory and as part of the National Swine Resource and Research Center (http://nsrrc.missouri.edu/). The genetic modifications that have been created include single and multiple transgenes, knockouts and a knockin. We performed the first gene knockout and knockin in swine.

This includes creating the first miniature pigs that have the alpha 1,3 galactosyltransferase gene knocked out. This groundbreaking work has the potential to prove very useful for xenotransplantation: the transfer of pig organs into humans. We also created pigs with a mutation in the gene that is responsible for causing cystic fibrosis (CF). Now there is a pig model that mimics the symptom of CF so that physicians have something to invasively experiment on and develop treatments and therapies. This is especially important since the same mutation in mice does not result in a phenotype that is similar to humans.
The laboratory has made over 290 cloned pigs representing wild types and 16 different genetic modifications. Read History