Jared Talbot

Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology

Portrait of Jared Talbot

Degree: Ph.D. 2011, University of Oregon
Phone: 207.581.2835
Website: Talbot Lab
Email: jared.talbot@maine.edu
Location: Office 303 Hitchner/Lab 301 Hitchner
Pronouns:  he/him/his

“My lab investigates how stem-like cells find their way to different parts of the embryo, and when they arrive turn into functional tissue. The tissue they generate happens to be muscle.”

Research Topic:
Muscle development; cell migration; vertebrate genetics

Research Program:
All conscious movement uses skeletal muscles, which are organized into a complex musculature that moves skeletal joints. To function, these muscles need to be positioned correctly during development and generate intricate contractile machinery. Our lab investigates how the musculature forms using zebrafish embryos.

1) What cues control muscle precursor cell movements? In all vertebrate species, a subset of muscle progenitors migrate to new locations in the embryo. These muscle precursors move in loosely associated streams, similar to the movement of metastatic tumors. In zebrafish, all of the precursor streams begin close to one another, but clump into separate streams that generate different muscles. We are using zebrafish embryos to identify the intrinsic and extrinsic cues that control these cell movements. These cues will teach us about muscle formation and potentially about cancer, since the cell movements and core genes known to drive muscle precursor migration are also known to promote tumor metastasis.

2) How do muscle fibers produce contractile structures? When muscle precursors begin to form muscle fibers they generate repeated arrays of Actin and Myosin filaments in units called sarcomeres. These Actin and Myosin filaments slide across one another to contract the muscle fiber or can release from one another to allow muscle extension. We have identified genes essential for sarcomere formation, that we hypothesize to function by controlling Actin-Myosin interactions. We are investigating how these genes influence Actin-Myosin interactions and how variants in sarcomeric protein can impact human health.

Publications:
1) Talbot JC, Teets EM, Ratnayake D, Duy PQ, Currie PD, Amacher SL. Muscle precursor cell movements in zebrafish are dynamic and require Six family genes. Development. 2019 May 15;146(10).
Highlighted online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjetPmG30_M

2) Talbot J, Maves L. Skeletal muscle fiber type: using insights from muscle developmental biology to dissect targets for susceptibility and resistance to muscle disease. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Dev Biol. 2016 Jul;5(4):518-34.

3) Talbot JC, Amacher SL. A streamlined CRISPR pipeline to reliably generate zebrafish frameshifting alleles. Zebrafish.2014 Dec;11(6):583-5.

A complete listing of my articles can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/jared.talbot.1/bibliography/public/