Srivastava Lab
Principal Investigator: Mansi Srivastava
Institution: Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Although the early embryos of humans and other vertebrates have pluripotent cells that can differentiate into all cell types of the animal, these flexible cells are absent in adults. In contrast, many invertebrate animals maintain pluripotency beyond embryogenesis, and harbor adult pluripotent stem cells (aPSCs) that enable whole-body regeneration. The long-term goal of the PI’s research program is to obtain a mechanistic understanding of how pluripotent stem cells are made, retained, and regulated in vivo such that they can regenerate any missing cell type in an adult animal. Across 750 million years of animal evolution, cells operate on conserved principles, thus invertebrate species that maintain pluripotent stem cells in adult animals can serve as informative model systems. The overall objective in this application is to identify the molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate aPSCs called “neoblasts” in the acoel Hofstenia miamia. Hofstenia can regenerate any missing cell type and is amenable to high-throughput functional studies of regeneration. The rationale for choosing a new model system over planarians, the more established system for studying neoblast…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM153252-03: Stem cell regulation during development and whole-body regeneration (2026)
- 5R34DA061984-02: Quantifying organism-environment interactions in a new model system for neuroscience (2026)
- 5R35GM153252-02: Stem cell regulation during development and whole-body regeneration (2025)
- 1R34DA061984-01: Quantifying organism-environment interactions in a new model system for neuroscience (2025)
- 1R35GM153252-01: Stem cell regulation during development and whole-body regeneration (2024)
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