Retinoids in Development and Disease

The goal of my research is to understand the function of retinoic acid (RA) during development. Early in my career I gained a broad background in developmental biology with expertise in the area of RA signaling that directed my research direction. As a postdoctoral fellow I cloned one of the first genes known to encode an enzyme for RA synthesis. As an Assistant Professor my research led to the discovery and characterization of one of the first RA response elements to be described. As a Professor at the Sanford Burnham Prebys (SBP) Medical Discovery Institute, I expanded my research into the function of RA by generating mouse knockouts of enzymes controlling RA synthesis. As a PI on several NIH-funded grants, I laid the groundwork for understanding RA function by providing genetic loss-of-function evidence implicating RA in major developmental pathways including eye development, body axis formation, somitogenesis, limb formation, and neurogenesis. I was an author on several reviews including a 2008 article in Cell summarizing what is known about embryonic RA synthesis and signaling, and a Cell SnapShot on Retinoic Acid Signaling in 2011. In 2015, my laboratory published a review in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology summarizing the developmental pathways and genes directly controlled by RA during organogenesis. In 2017, I published a Letter in Science describing how challenges in the RA signaling field can be solved with more reliance on knockout studies which can now be performed more easily with CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing. In 2019, I published a Development at A Glance review on RA signaling in Development along with Dr. Ghyselinck who is a co-Editor in this volume of Current Topics in Development and Disease. My goal now is to bring knowledge of how RA normally functions to as wide an audience as possible.