Macias-Muñoz Lab
Principal Investigator: Aide Macias-Muñoz
Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary: Regeneration, the ability to heal and regrow, can vary across species, tissues, and even cell types. To harness regenerative ability into therapeutic medicine, we need to gain a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms, cell types, and genetics that enable the regeneration of different tissues in different animals. Yet, most existing studies are limited to a handful of model organisms and few candidate genes. This has led to a gap in understanding the degree of constraints or malleability in the features that enable regeneration in different organisms. To address this, my lab is establishing eyed cnidarians (jellyfish) as innovative systems to investigate the cellular and molecular mechanisms of eye development and regeneration. Characterizing the cellular and genetic trajectories of development and regeneration in Cnidaria, the sister group to Bilateria, holds the potential to provide critical insight into the evolutionary conservation or innovation in cell types and genetic machinery that underlie regenerative ability in animals. This proposal will utilize single-cell sequencing, in situ hybridization, and gene knockdowns in cnidarians with convergently evol…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R35GM166544-01: Deciphering the cellular and genetic features of development and regeneration using eyed cnidarians (2026)
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