Booth Lab
Principal Investigator: David Scott Booth
Institution: University of California, San Francisco (San Francisco, CA)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students
Research Focus
ABSTRACT Animals build their multicellular bodies with diverse types of cells that perform and integrate distinct functions. Animals, however, are not unique in their capacity to generate distinct cell types. In fact, their closest living relatives, a group of aquatic, unicellular, bacterivorous protists called choanoflagellates, detect biotic and abiotic cues to differentiate into phenotypically and functionally distinct cell types in different environments. Choanoflagellates also possess critical genes that regulate animal cell differentiation during development, supporting the hypothesis that cell differentiation mechanisms evolved prior to the origin of animals and became integral in animal and choanoflagellate biology. Although nearly 800 million years of animal evolution has shaped human biology since we last shared a common ancestor with choanoflagellates, the commonalities in genetic toolkits and cytological characteristics indicate that choanoflagellates have tremendous potential as microeukaryotic models to investigate the core functions of genes that regulate cell differentiation. During my postdoc, I pioneered the first methods for gene delivery and genome editing in th…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM147404-05: The ancestry of animal cell differentiation and pluripotency (2026)
- 5R35GM147404-04: The ancestry of animal cell differentiation and pluripotency (2025)
- 5R35GM147404-03: The ancestry of animal cell differentiation and pluripotency (2024)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com